According to Spielvogel, "virtually 90 percent of the Jewish population of Poland, the Baltics and Germany were exterminated," which meant the deaths "of nearly two people out of three European Jews” (Spielvogel, 871). Many of those who marched rarely survived the march to the camps alone. The death march experienced personally by Weissmann Klein lasted from the end of January until mid-April 1945. As Weissmann Klein explained, there were nearly four thousand girls in total from the surrounding labor camps, including his own, separated into two groups of two thousand. Referring to the group into which she was placed, he observed that “out of two thousand only one hundred and twenty survived” (Weissmann). Klein, 183).The conditions during the march were brutal as the weather was extremely cold and snow fell. Many girls were unprepared because they had no warm clothes or shoes, which Weissmann Klein briefly recounts: “Many Hungarian girls had no shoes. To save their lives they stole shoes from the feet of those who slept” (Weissmann Klein 183). Fortunately, early in her experiences her father advised her to wear ski shoes, to which she says: "Those shoes played a vital role in saving my life. They were thoughtful and strong, and when they were taken away from me three years later with frozen feet they were still good..." (Weissmann Klein