Gita's escape during the death march

Gita's escape during the death march is the hinge on which her entire postwar life turns. In the final winter of the war, as the SS evacuated Birkenau and Auschwitz, Gita Furman found herself among thousands of women trudging through ankle-deep snow along a narrow track, her fate seemingly sealed by the same machinery that had brought her to the camp as prisoner 34902. Yet this march, designed to be a death sentence for those too weak to continue, became the stage for her most decisive act of resistance: a headlong run toward a lone house, a dense wood, and freedom. It is the moment the narrative transforms her from a survivor of the camp into an architect of her own liberation, and it sets the stage for her reunion with Lale Sokolov in Bratislava, the man who had tattooed her number and then spent years trying to keep her alive.

The March from Birkenau

The evacuation began with Gita and her friends marching alongside thousands of other women from Birkenau and Auschwitz, their progress measured in the dwindling numbers of those who could still stand. The women trudged along a narrow track through snow that fell heavily and mercilessly, and they were all too aware that any straggling was dealt with by a bullet. Gita and Dana searched the rows as carefully as they could, asking a hundred times, "Have you seen Cilka? Have you seen Ivana?" The answer was always the same. To support each other, the women linked arms, and at seemingly random times they were halted and told to take a rest. Despite the cold, they sat in the snow, anything to give their feet some relief. Many remained there when the order to move on came: dead or dying, unable to take another step. Day became night, and still they marched, their numbers dwindling, which only made it harder to escape the watchful eye of the SS.

Dana's Sacrifice

The march exacted its cruelest price on Gita's closest companion. During the night, Dana dropped to her knees, unable to go on any longer. Gita stopped with her, and for a while they were unseen, screened by other women. Dana kept telling Gita to go on, to leave her, but Gita protested, declaring she would rather die there with her friend in a field somewhere in Poland. Four young girls offered to help carry Dana, but Dana would not hear of it. She told them to take Gita and go. As an SS officer advanced on them, the four girls pulled Gita to her feet and dragged her with them. Gita looked back at the officer, who stopped beside Dana but moved on without drawing his pistol. No shot rang out; clearly he thought she was already dead. The girls continued to drag Gita, refusing to let her go as she attempted to break free and get back to Dana. The sound of random shots barely registered now, and no one turned around to see who had fallen.

The Decision to Run

As day broke, the women were brought to a halt in a field by a train track, where an engine and several cattle wagons stood waiting. Gita thought, "They brought me here. Now they will take me away." She had learned that the four girls she was now traveling with were Polish and not Jewish, taken from their families for reasons they did not know, coming from four different towns and unknown to each other before Birkenau. Across the field stood a lone house, and behind it a dense wood spread out. SS barked out orders as the train engine was stoked with coal. The Polish girls turned to Gita, and one of them said, "We're going to make a run for that house. If we get shot, then we will die here, but we're not going any farther. Do you want to come with us?" Gita stood up. Once the girls were running, they did not look back.

Refuge and the Red Slashes

The act of loading thousands of exhausted women onto the train took all the guards' attention, and the door to the house was opened before the girls reached it. Inside, they collapsed in front of a roaring fire, adrenaline and relief surging through them. Hot drinks were placed in their hands, along with bread. The Polish girls talked frantically to the homeowners, who shook their heads in disbelief. Gita said nothing, not wanting her accent to give away the fact that she was not Polish; it was better their saviors thought she was one of them, the quiet one. The man of the house said they could not stay, as the Germans often searched the premises. He told them to take their coats off, took them out behind the house, and when he returned, the red slashes were gone and the coats smelled of petrol. Outside, they heard repeated shooting, and peering through the curtains, they watched as all the surviving women were finally herded onto the train, bodies littering the snow beside the tracks. The man gave the girls the address of a relative in a nearby village, as well as a supply of bread and a blanket. They left the house and entered the woods, where they spent the night on the freezing ground, curled up together in a vain attempt to stay warm, the bare trees providing little protection from being seen or from the elements.

Aftermath and Significance

The escape was not an end but a beginning of a new kind of ordeal. It was early evening before they arrived in the next village, the sun gone down and the weak streetlamps casting little light. They were forced to ask a passerby for help finding the address they had been given, and the kind woman took them to the house they sought and stayed with them while they knocked on the door. Gita's survival through this flight, and her eventual reunion with Lale in Bratislava, stands in stark contrast to the fates of others: her friend Dana was left for dead on the march, and her friend Cilka was later charged as a Nazi conspirator and sentenced to fifteen years' hard labor in Siberia. The escape also carries a deeper narrative weight, as the author of Lale's story reflects that memory and history sometimes waltz in step and sometimes strain to part, and that Lale's memories, remarkably clear and precise, matched her research into people, dates, and places. Gita's flight is one of those moments where the lived reality of a survivor and the historical record of the death marches converge, a testament to the desperate courage that could still emerge even as the machinery of the Holocaust ground toward its final, chaotic end.