Mara Ginic's Escape

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Mara Ginic was fortunate. Her mother, an ethnic German, was able to aid her ex-husband (Mara's father) and Mara in their escape from Belgrade in 1941. Her story is exceptional within the Holocaust context, and her luck was not shared by many others. At the same time though, she too faced death, starvation and persecution. She too was forced to flee everything she once knew, in order to survive.

The photos of her and her father on their journey to safety in Switzerland do not tell the whole story. Her smile was in the moment, but beneath that facade was most likely the fear and desolation experienced by so many throughout the Holocaust.

In the high peaks of the Italian Alps, Mara and her father wandered aimlessly for days, without food, sufficient clothing, or shelter. She was going to give up, and die there in the wilderness, lacking hope and a desire to live. These feelings were also felt in the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos; the difference lay in the daily horrors. Where Holocaust victims within the Nazi persecution system faced an everpresent vigilence of terror, Mara and her father faced the terror of an abyss: the lack of humanity at the hands of the most primeval force: mother nature.

The terror Holocaust victims felt was implemented by the "Nazi beast" through every possible manner. Even their absence in the near-death experience of Mara and her father in Northern Italy echoed the Nazi party's goals: the elimination of the Jews, the forced removal of hope and the desire to live.

Mara was lucky. She lived to tell her story, and spent the last two years of the war safe in a village in Switzerland. The "Nazi beast" still followed her though. Even after the Holocaust ended, it didn't really end for her or any of the other survivors; they continued to be pursued by the ghosts of their past. Mara continued to run, to escape to safety for the remainder of her life. In the post-war years, she decided not to return to her native Yugoslavia, but rather to Italy, then Argentina, then Italy again, then France, then Venezuela, then Brazil, then Austria, and finally the United States. Her continued migrations appear to reflect the feelings she probably had throughout the war. Never being safe, and never being home.

Mara survived. She escaped. She continues to escape to this day, as the memories of the Holocaust continue to pursue her, along with countless other Holocaust survivors.