Label
These shoes belonged to the donor's friend, Gisele Friedman, who was held at Auschwitz and was part of the death march to Bergen Belsen, where she was liberated.Gisele Friedmann was born in Hungary in 1906. She studied in Vienna and eventually settled in Paris. In July 1943 she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was subjected to medical experiments. In January 1945 Gisele was was of the 10,000 inmates of Auschwitz who was sent to West on the Nazi 'death marches'. She spent five days travelling in a covered train followed by a five-day forced march in freezing conditions with hardly any food. She then spent a further five days travelling in an open truck before reaching Bergen Belsen. She was eventually liberated from Belsen. The 'Death Marches' -As the Nazis retreated before Soviet troops they tried to hide all evidence of their crimes. The surviving inmates of the Nazi death camps were evacuated and forced West. Some prisoners were evacuated by trains, often in open goods wagons, but most were force-marched hundreds of miles in dreadful conditions, including rain and snow. Thousands were shot because they were too weak or ill to continue whilst many others died of starvation, disease and exposure on the way. These became known as the "death marches". Of the 66,000 prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz, for example, about 15,000 died. Death marches also took place from other camps including Dachau, Mauthausen and Ravensbruck as well as cities such as Budapest.
History note
Walter Laqueur (ed), 'The Holocaust Encyclopedia' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p.137.
Physical description
right shoe, left shoe, both with laces One right shoe and one left shoe -not from the same pair, both are laced and made from brown-coloured leather, the left shoe is plainer in design than the right which has a little more decorative seam detail on the toe and on the laces panel, heels are approximately 4cms high although both shoes are very well worn and were probably worn together by the owner, there are metal studs at the bottom of each shoe, the left shoe has a series of small metal studs all around the edge, the right shoe has fewer larger metal studs all over, all studs are badly rusted
![MEMORY OF THE CAMPS [Allocated Title]](http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib/placeholder_mid.png)
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