Broch, Ludivine/Sorrell, Martin The Phantom Train

The Last of the Special Operations Executive's Secret Agents

On 3 July 1944, a train carrying cattle cars departed from Toulouse bound for Germany. The cars were crammed with 724 people of various nationalities and backgrounds, all of whom had been held captive by the German occupiers in concentration camps and prisons in southwestern France. Among them was Francesco Fausto Nitti, an Italian anti-fascist who had survived Mussolini's prisons and the Spanish Civil War. The journey to Dachau was supposed to take three days. Instead, bombed, diverted and often immobilised, it took two months, making it the longest of all deportation journeys from France during the Second World War. Nitti kept a daily diary of the odyssey of the so-called Phantom Train, and this document was in his pocket when he and several fellow prisoners made a dangerous last-minute escape on 25 August by removing some floorboards from their carriage and lowering themselves onto the tracks as the train sped through the night. Back with his family and the Resistance, Nitti turned his diary into a book, which was published in late 1944 by a small publishing house run by a member of the Resistance. With this first English translation of The Phantom Train and an expanded introduction, a whole new audience can now learn about this endless journey to Dachau and everything that led up to it, and admire the determination and perseverance of some courageous people, especially the remarkable Francesco Fausto Nitti.