Title: Children of Winter - Gilbert Bordes - book
Summary :
The moving story of six children lost in the mountains and left to fend for themselves during the Occupation.
1943. Winter has just descended on Oustal, a high-mountain refuge in the heart of the Pyrenees. Two men are held at gunpoint by the SS: they want to know where the six children of resistance fighters they were trying to evacuate to Spain are hiding. Faced with the stubborn silence of the smugglers, they execute them. But the children remain untraceable. Soon frozen, the SS give up the search and decide to let them die of cold. They place explosives on the only footbridge connecting the refuge to the valley and blow it up... Hidden in a cave, the children have seen it all. They are now prisoners of the mountain for an entire winter. Son or daughter of a communist, a worker or a bourgeois, Jewish or Christian, they will have to get along to have any chance of survival.