German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer dies at age 103
Her death was announced by the Margot Friedländer Foundation in Berlin on its website. Details about where she died, as well as the cause of death, were not immediately made public.
She died the week of the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II.
After spending much of her life in the United States, Friedländer returned to live in the German capital in her 80s. She was honored with Germany's highest decoration and with a statue at Berlin's City Hall.
'What I do gives me my strength and probably also my energy, because I speak for those who can no longer speak,' Friedländer said at an event at Berlin's Jewish Museum in 2018.
'I would like to say that I don't just speak for the 6 million Jews who were killed, but for all the people who were killed — innocent people,' she said.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed his condolences in a statement, saying she gave Germany reconciliation despite the horrors she went through here in her life. Steinmeier said the country cannot be grateful enough for her gift.
A report released last month said more than 200,000 Jewish survivors are still alive but 70% of them will be gone within the next 10 years.
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Indian Express
14 hours ago
- Indian Express
Sagari Chhabra's exhibition featuring invisible battles that played key role in India's freedom
Against the backdrop of India's 79th Independence Day, the quiet hall of the Art Gallery at Kamaladevi Complex, India International Centre, at New Delhi's Lodhi Gardens comes alive with voices from another time — voices that fought, bled, and sacrificed, yet remain absent from the history most of us know. The exhibition Hamaara Itihaas Archives of Freedom Fighters, on from August 9 to 23, is founded and curated by award-winning filmmaker and writer Sagari Chhabra. This exhibition features India's first and perhaps only international archive with a dedicated focus on women freedom fighters. Its purpose is as much to inspire as to educate, and to remind us that independence was won not only in the streets of India but beyond the borders, across the continents. Since 1995, Chhabra has been gathering oral testimonies, fragile letters, faded photographs, rare revolutionary publications like Bande Mataram and Talvar — by Madam Bhikaiji Cama, photographed fading faces, and pieced together the overlooked geography of India's independence movement. From the history of Mahendra Pratap's establishment of the First Provisional Government of India in Kabul in 1915, to Shyamji Krishna Varma's India House in London that provided a roof for all the nationalists to gather under — all the stories dismantle the notion that India's independence was fought on home soil alone. One of the exhibition's most striking sections centres on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army (INA) and its legendary Rani of Jhansi Regiment. Recruited largely in Malaysia (Malaya) and Singapore during World War II, these women underwent rigorous military training, shouldering rifles and marching in step with their male counterparts. Through photographs collected and captured by Chhabra, the visitors are introduced to Gowri Sen, who reportedly signed a petition in blood when the regiment was disbanded; Rasammah Navaratnam, whose mother was firmly against her decision of joining the INA, but was later persuaded by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, who was the commander of Rani of Jhansi regiment; and Yamuki, who escaped an unwanted marriage to 'die for a cause', yet was never granted recognition or pension by free India. 'Most of these women had never had a reunion, never received a pension. Recording their experiences became my life's mission. It is a privilege, and an honour,' says Chhabra. The archive reaches far into Myanmar, where many INA veterans remain stateless to this day, denied citizenship by both India and Myanmar. Photographs by Chhabra capture the faces of Lt Perumal with his wife Mehrunnisa, standing before the remnants of an INA office in Yangon. The Gallery has many more stories — Tokyo Cadets trained for aerial warfare, one of them being Gandhinathan, who was photographed by Chhabra in Kuala Lumpur in 2004, the secret operatives in Malaysia, teenagers in the Balak Sena of Thailand, all getting trained through their youth to achieve a nation's dream of freedom. The exhibition also honours women who stitched their defiance into prison flags, who ferried messages for underground networks while raising children at home. It tells stories of Bengal's Pritilata Waddedar, who chose cyanide over capture, Gandhian activist Sushila Nayyar, who balanced her belief in non-violence with acts of resistance, and women prisoners who raised a Tricolour flag inside Lahore Women's jail in 1942. Running alongside the exhibition is the screening of Chhabra's 45-minute-long documentary Asli Azaadi, released in 1997 and daily walk-through at 5.30 pm led by the curator herself. Her storytelling bridges the gap between the dust of the past and the pulse of the present. For her, this is not just an act of remembrance but a rewriting of history from the margins. Hamaara Itihaas stands as a reminder that freedom was never a gift — it was seized, demanded, and defended by countless known and unknown heroes. Their battles, fought in jungles, jails, and faraway cities, deserve to be part of the nation's collective memory.
Hindustan Times
a day ago
- Hindustan Times
George Steinmetz: 'The Indian bureaucracy is really quite impressive! '
'There are parts of our food system that some people don't want us to see.' You say that in your author note. What was the most invisibilised part of the food chain that you photographed? George Steinmetz (Courtesy the subject) Animal operations are quite sensitive to get access to. People get really touchy because there's been -- especially in the industrialized world -- a lot more concern about animal rights and farmers get criticized a lot for it. Then, there's large scale agriculture. People in the corporate world are very cautious. When you go to a private farmer who has five acres of land and you want to photograph them harvesting their stuff, there's no issue. But when you get into corporations, they get nervous and the lawyers get involved and it gets all very closed. I also looked at fishing quite a bit and it's difficult getting onto fishing boats. Squid boats can be at sea for six months at a time. I wasn't volunteering for that. The other thing that's really complicated are illegal activities, whether it's illegal fishing or immigrant labour. In the United States, for example, close to half of the food is harvested by undocumented workers. And lastly, the government things. In India, there's a huge government food corporation which sells large amounts of food to the poor at subsidized prices. There's a lot of waste in those warehouses. But India, as you know, has a lot of bureaucracy. You try to get into those warehouses, and it's extremely difficult. The bureaucracy is really quite impressive! What does your research look like? Well, it's complicated. Let's say, I was looking at sugar. I was told that Brazil has the biggest sugar plantations in the world. And you do Google searches, and all of a sudden India starts popping up as the biggest sugar producer. There's such a big market, mostly for internal consumption. In India, I worked with Saurabh Tripathi. I would give him a general idea of what I was looking for. And then he would do a lot of picture research and statistical research. And it's better to have somebody do those searches in that market. I had somebody work for me in China, in Brazil, and in German-Italian-speaking Europe. In California, I was out in the lettuce fields with the pickers, and then I went back to the packing house and a guy said you've got to go to Bakersfield where one building produces about 40 percent of the carrots in the United States. It looks like rivers of orange; it's incredible. But they had never let anybody photograph in there before. There's an old saying in journalism that no is not an answer. It's just kind of a bad beginning. And so, you have to find another way. Sometimes you don't succeed, but often you can. 255pp, ₹6327; Harry N Abrams Inc What was it like to contrast industrial livestock supply chains and an artisanal butchery, like you photographed in Belgium? I'm not a pig whisperer, obviously. I can't talk to pigs, you know, but you go and you look and you can see the animals are stressed. They're going into the kill chute and they're resisting. I saw that with pigs. And they're much more intelligent than the chickens or the cows. It's really quite disturbing to watch. But in the small butchery I went to in Belgium, they were doing a really good job. And the pigs didn't really know they were about to go down. They would be killed instantly. It's interesting in that small butcher shop, their prices were only 20% more than they would be in the supermarket, which is actually really good for the small-scale operation. And he had producers who raised animals just for him. He was doing really high-quality work for very little extra cost, with the efficiency of proximity. I also went to the biggest slaughterhouse in Brazil for cattle and they were pretty good. I didn't see cows that missed the shot and were maimed. In India, I went to the biggest buffalo slaughterhouse and it was really fascinating. It was all Muslims and they had to kill them halal. It was quick. They were doing a good job. I didn't see people abusing animals. There's no incentive for a farmer to abuse animals. I'm sure it exists somewhere. But I didn't go looking for it and I didn't see it. What do you think about the current politics globally on the role of migrants? The people at the top don't really understand the reality of what is going on, who's actually providing the work. In the US, less than 2% of the population is involved in food production. So, there's this huge disconnect. They go to the market and a little piece of meat comes in a little foam tray and they have no idea. Go to the dairy farmers in the United States, they can't get American workers. It's physically tiring. It's very repetitive. It's kind of boring. And they just don't want to do it. But they can get undocumented workers to do that kind of work at a reasonable price. And if you paid American workers $50 an hour, they might do that. But Latino workers will do that for $10 an hour and they'll live in some crummy little trailer out back. If the government were to say, okay, we're going to control the quality of the living standards for the workers and then raise the price of milk 30%, then you could do that. But government doesn't want to do that. So, you have a system where there's a huge disconnect. I think, in the United States, about 40% of the labour is considered undocumented. You have photographed shog, the shit fog, in a part of the United States, and also the Third Pole in India. How was it to capture these with aerial photography? It's tricky. If I find an issue that's discussed and is important, I have to see if I can find a way to photograph it. With the shog, the shit fog, I talked to people who knew it, and they would say, okay, you want to come to this part of Texas, in this month, and you want to be there on a really hot, windy day. And then, there's the physical problem, like people who had the feedlots don't want us to photograph their property because they don't want their problem seen. So, I had to find one that was next to a road. To cut down that shog, you put sprinklers in the feed yard to keep the dust down. But it's only for one month a year, and they'd rather not spend the money on the sprinklers. And so, they're being cheap, and creating this problem for others. And with the Third Pole in India, it's challenging photographing water issues, and I don't think I did a very good job of that. There were some really big water development systems, places where they had like big storage and irrigation issues, and I just couldn't find a way to photograph that, but we tried. What does climate change mean for existing vulnerabilities and inequalities? I saw it most acutely in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh. With the monsoons getting more severe and the sea level slowly rising, people were farming rice inches above the tide line. It was kind of like you're stuck with your feet in the mud and the water's up to here (your nose). Then they get a big storm with a tidal surge and all their rice gets wiped out by the salt water. That was the most dramatic area I saw. Women are doing a lot of the work and also having to take care of their kids. The women were the ones who were being probably squeezed the hardest. What was it like to look at smallholder farming and large agri-corporations like you've done for the book? Well, I can tell you as a photographer, it's a lot trickier to get great pictures of the smallholder farmers. You go to the sugar mill in India. It looks kind of like the one in Brazil. But the farmers, it's just like three people out in their fields cutting cane with a long knife. And you go to Brazil, they have these monster machines. So, the big stuff is actually a lot easier to photograph. And it's more extraordinary. But that's not the norm. There's a huge percentage of the world's agriculture that's still being done by smallholder farmers. But even in India, you find those smallholder farmers are getting squeezed. In Europe, they have huge subsidies for smallholder farmers. And in other countries like the US, Brazil, that's not done as much. How was it to document agriculture in India? Well, it was a surprise to me. I was trying to cover the whole world but for India, I had to make three trips because it was so vast and seasonal and you have to choose. I really wanted to look at the red pepper harvest, because red -- it's kind of lame -- but it's going to photograph really well. And Kashmir; saffron is the most expensive crop in the world. I can't get into Iran where most of it is grown, but India I can do. I was looking at the global story of agriculture and to find things that are really particularly Indian. The scale of shrimp farming was really good. And I wanted to go the grain markets in Punjab. The stubble burning is a really important story. And I decided that I wanted to do the rice instead of the wheat. India was visually amazing; I would say it is like organized chaos. It's fascinating. In the West, people don't think of India as being a technical innovator, but I found quite the opposite. Like the biggest tractor factory in India. People think it's John Deere. But it's Mahindra. As a journalist, I love telling those surprises. And India was full of surprises for me. Where do you see farming and food production a decade from now? I think we'll see more consolidation. And I think you're going to see continued gains in productivity. There's been a lot of work with improved plant science and plant genetics. The experts were saying we have to double the global food supply by 2050. I think that's actually doable. I've seen big advances in fisheries. But at the same time, I see big problems like the Amazon disappearing. You really need to have strict, better enforcement of wild lands. Otherwise, we're going to lose all the wild spaces and wildlife that we have. What did you leave out? You know, we couldn't do everything. It would have been interesting to look at farming in Russia. As an American, with the current political situation, I didn't think it was realistic to be flying there. Everybody grows food and everybody does it differently. And I tried to pick out the best examples. And at some point, you have to say, well, enough. I worked on it for over 10 years. And I realised, at the end, that if I kept going, the pictures I took at the beginning, which are really good pictures, would become irrelevant because the farming techniques were changing. And now it's time for me to do something new. Aparna Karthikeyan is an independent journalist and author based in Chennai
The Hindu
2 days ago
- The Hindu
Easy like Sunday morning quiz on borders
A molecular biologist from Madurai, our quizmaster enjoys trivia and music, and is working on a rock ballad called 'Coffee is a Drink, Kaapi is an Emotion'. @bertyashley Quiz: Easy like Sunday morning - All about borders Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit YOUR SCORE 0 /10 RETAKE THE QUIZ 1 / 10 | On August 17, 1947, a demarcation line between two recently independent countries was published. Known as the Radcliffe Line, it was named after Cyril Radcliffe, who was the joint chairman of the boundary commissions. What two countries does the 3,323-km line separate? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : India and Pakistan SHOW ANSWER 2 / 10 | The KDMZ is a strip of land running near the 38th parallel north and roughly divides the peninsula into two halves. The 250-km-long line has been fiercely guarded by the military on both sides since 1953, although the DMZ itself stands for De-Militarized Zone. Which two countries are separated by this zone? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : North and South Korea SHOW ANSWER 3 / 10 | This was a physical boundary that divided Europe into two from the end of World War II till 1991. On the western side were NATO members, and on the eastern side were countries affiliated with the Soviet Union. The name refers to an actual safety curtain used in theatres to stop fires from spreading. What is the name of this border? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : Iron Curtain SHOW ANSWER 4 / 10 | The world's longest border is also the longest without a military defence, making it the longest 'undefended' border. Stretching 8,891 km long, it was established in 1783, seven years after one of them gained independence. Which two countries share this border? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : U.S. and Canada SHOW ANSWER 5 / 10 | This was one of the most heavily fortified borders of all time, and more than a hundred people died trying to cross it. Eventually, the border was brought down overnight because of a mistaken announcement by an official. By what name was this historic border known? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : The Berlin Wall SHOW ANSWER 6 / 10 | In 1989, this country had land borders with three countries: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. As of 2002, it shares borders with Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia. Which country is this that, without changing its own borders, no longer borders any of the countries it did in 1989? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : Poland SHOW ANSWER 7 / 10 | The border between these two countries was so complicated that there was a 'third-order enclave' until 2015. Dahala Khagrabari was a piece of one country inside another country, which was itself inside the first country. Which two countries are these? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : India and Bangladesh SHOW ANSWER 8 / 10 | The biggest official time jump you can get just by crossing a land border is three and a half hours. You will need to reset your watch when travelling west from Afghanistan, which is in the UTC+4:30 time zone. What is the other country that follows UTC+8? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : China SHOW ANSWER 9 / 10 | The border between Botswana and Zambia is at an important point where they both border the Zambezi River. Stretching 150 metres long, what record does this border hold? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : Shortest border between two countries SHOW ANSWER
