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Grim story. Now, let me add the necessary context to understand it, and it would be time and place where it happened.
It was late 1944 in Nazi occupied Hungary.
In this context, choosing to join underground resistance group was choosing to die for the cause, soon and often in rather unpleasant way, and it was clear to everyone.
Nothing "marxist" or "materialist" about this particular case, staunch Christian anticommunist Polish resistance would also execute their members at the slight suspicion they are compromised and endanger the group as a whole. These are rules of actual guerilla resistance against serious and determined enemy.
According to an article published in an 1998 issue of a Hungarian periodical of social sciences, reproduced online in .txt format, the young Jewish woman in question was carrying forged papers and hiding in a safehouse which she had to leave because it got compromised, and no replacement could be found. Fearing that her likely capture will compromise them all, the cell members (including her partner/lover) all unanimously voted to force her to commit suicide. In 1950, party organs investigated the matter and concluded that Lakatos formed the underground cell without permission from above and was the main culprit in this suicide, was expelled from the party as a consequence and was sent to a notorious forced labor camp (interned, technically speaking, although in retrospect it’s impossible to confirm what further considerations, if any, were decisive in that). According to his social circle he was pretty much a Dostoevsky character.
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Why would it be clear to everyone? It's clearly false: the war ended within a year, with their team winning. In fact, this resistance leader himself survived the war.
I'm not saying there aren't people with a martyrdom fetish, but that's their problem, not an objective analysis of the situation or even a coherent strategy. In the words of one of the generals on the winning team: "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
"Accepting the risk of death" is probably a more accurate description than "choosing to die for the cause" in this context.
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