Latest news with #Friedlaender
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany lays to rest Margot Friedlaender, Holocaust survivor key to remembrance culture
BERLIN (Reuters) - Margot Friedlaender, a Holocaust survivor who played an important role in Germany's remembrance culture ensuring the country's Nazi past is not played down with the passage of time, was laid to rest on Thursday after dying last week aged 103. A funeral ceremony took place at a Jewish cemetery and Holocaust memorial site in Weissensee, Berlin, the city where Friedlaender was born and to which she eventually returned. Among the mourners were President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who bowed to her coffin which was covered in pink and white flowers. Friedlaender died on May 9, almost exactly 80 years after the Soviet Red Army liberated the Theresienstadt concentration camp where she was imprisoned. For Steinmeier, she embodied the "miracle of reconciliation" between Germany and Jews around the world, while Merz called her "one of the strongest voices of our time: for peaceful coexistence, against anti-Semitism and forgetting". Friedlaender was born in Berlin in 1921 to Auguste and Arthur Bendheim, a businessman. Her parents split in 1937 and Auguste tried in vain to emigrate with Margot and her younger brother, Ralph, in the face of intensifying persecution of Jews. Her father was deported in August 1942 to the Auschwitz death camp where he was murdered. In early 1943, on the day Margot, Ralph and Auguste were set to make a final attempt to leave Germany, Ralph was arrested by the Gestapo secret police. Auguste was not with her son at the time but turned herself in to accompany him in deportation to Auschwitz where both later died. Margot went underground and managed to elude the Gestapo by dying her hair red and having her nose operated on. But she was finally apprehended in April 1944 by Jewish "catchers" - Jews recruited to track down others in hiding in exchange for security - and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is the Czech Republic today. She survived Theresienstadt and met her future husband, Adolf Friedlaender, there in early 1945, shortly before the liberation of all Nazi camps at the end of World War Two, and they emigrated to New York in 1946. In New York, Margot worked as a dressmaker and travel agent, while her husband held senior posts in Jewish organisations. Both vowed never to return to Germany. After her husband's death Margot revisited Berlin in 2003, among a number of Holocaust survivors invited back by the German capital's governing Senate. She moved back for good in 2010, at age 88, regaining her German citizenship and giving talks about her Holocaust experiences, particularly in German schools. "Not only did she extend a hand to us Germans – she came back; she gave us the gift of her tremendously generous heart and her unfailing humanity," Steinmeier said this week. Friedlaender's autobiography, "Try To Make Your Life - a Jewish Girl Hiding in Nazi Berlin" was published in 2008, titled after the final message that her mother managed to pass on to Margot. She was awarded Germany's Federal Cross of Merit in 2011 and in 2014, the Margot Friedlaender Prize was created to support students in Holocaust remembrance and encourage young people to show moral courage. In a 2021 interview with Die Zeit magazine marking her centenary, Friedlaender reflected on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party's rise since 2015 on the back of anti-immigrant sentiment, saying it made her uncomfortable. "I remember how excited the 10-year-old boys were back then (in Nazi era) when they were allowed to march. When you saw how people absorbed that - you don't forget that," she said. "I always say: I love people, and I think there is something good in everyone, but equally I think there is something bad in everyone." (Writing by Miranda Murray and Matthias Williams; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Reuters
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Germany lays to rest Margot Friedlaender, Holocaust survivor key to remembrance culture
BERLIN, May 15 (Reuters) - Margot Friedlaender, a Holocaust survivor who played an important role in Germany's remembrance culture ensuring the country's Nazi past is not played down with the passage of time, was laid to rest on Thursday after dying last week aged 103. A funeral ceremony took place at a Jewish cemetery and Holocaust memorial site in Weissensee, Berlin, the city where Friedlaender was born and to which she eventually returned. Among the mourners were President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who bowed to her coffin which was covered in pink and white flowers. Friedlaender died on May 9, almost exactly 80 years after the Soviet Red Army liberated the Theresienstadt concentration camp where she was imprisoned. For Steinmeier, she embodied the "miracle of reconciliation" between Germany and Jews around the world, while Merz called her "one of the strongest voices of our time: for peaceful coexistence, against anti-Semitism and forgetting". Friedlaender was born in Berlin in 1921 to Auguste and Arthur Bendheim, a businessman. Her parents split in 1937 and Auguste tried in vain to emigrate with Margot and her younger brother, Ralph, in the face of intensifying persecution of Jews. Her father was deported in August 1942 to the Auschwitz death camp where he was murdered. In early 1943, on the day Margot, Ralph and Auguste were set to make a final attempt to leave Germany, Ralph was arrested by the Gestapo secret police. Auguste was not with her son at the time but turned herself in to accompany him in deportation to Auschwitz where both later died. Margot went underground and managed to elude the Gestapo by dying her hair red and having her nose operated on. But she was finally apprehended in April 1944 by Jewish "catchers" - Jews recruited to track down others in hiding in exchange for security - and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is the Czech Republic today. She survived Theresienstadt and met her future husband, Adolf Friedlaender, there in early 1945, shortly before the liberation of all Nazi camps at the end of World War Two, and they emigrated to New York in 1946. In New York, Margot worked as a dressmaker and travel agent, while her husband held senior posts in Jewish organisations. Both vowed never to return to Germany. After her husband's death Margot revisited Berlin in 2003, among a number of Holocaust survivors invited back by the German capital's governing Senate. She moved back for good in 2010, at age 88, regaining her German citizenship and giving talks about her Holocaust experiences, particularly in German schools. "Not only did she extend a hand to us Germans – she came back; she gave us the gift of her tremendously generous heart and her unfailing humanity," Steinmeier said this week. Friedlaender's autobiography, "Try To Make Your Life - a Jewish Girl Hiding in Nazi Berlin" was published in 2008, titled after the final message that her mother managed to pass on to Margot. She was awarded Germany's Federal Cross of Merit in 2011 and in 2014, the Margot Friedlaender Prize was created to support students in Holocaust remembrance and encourage young people to show moral courage. In a 2021 interview with Die Zeit magazine marking her centenary, Friedlaender reflected on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party's rise since 2015 on the back of anti-immigrant sentiment, saying it made her uncomfortable. "I remember how excited the 10-year-old boys were back then (in Nazi era) when they were allowed to march. When you saw how people absorbed that - you don't forget that," she said. "I always say: I love people, and I think there is something good in everyone, but equally I think there is something bad in everyone."
Korea Herald
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Korea Herald
German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer dies at age 103
BERLIN (AP) — Margot Friedlaender, a German Jew who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and became a high-profile witness to Nazi persecution in her final years, died Friday. She was 103. Her death was announced by the Margot Friedlaender 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, Friedlaender 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," Friedlaender 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 percent of them will be gone within the next 10 years. Friedlaender was born Margot Bendheim on Nov. 5, 1921. Her father, Artur Bendheim, owned a shop in Berlin. He had fought for Germany and had been decorated in World War I. Friedlaender recalled that, after the Nazis took power, her father initially said that "they don't mean us; We're Germans." She added that "we didn't see it until it was too late." Friedlaender wanted to design clothes and started an apprenticeship as a tailor. After her parents divorced in 1937, Friedlaender, her mother and younger brother went to live with her grandparents. In 1941, they had to move to a so-called "Jewish apartment," and Friedlaender was forced to work nights at a metal factory. In January 1943, just as the family was planning to flee Berlin, Friedlaender returned home to discover that her brother, Ralph, had been taken away by the Gestapo. A neighbor told her that her mother had decided to go to the police and "go with Ralph, wherever that may be." She passed on her mother's final message — "Try to make your life," which would later become the title of Friedlaender's autobiography — along with her handbag. Friedlaender went into hiding, taking off the yellow star that Jews were obliged to wear. She recalled getting her hair dyed red, reasoning that "people think Jews don't have red hair." She said that 16 people helped keep her under the radar over the next 15 months. That ended in April 1944 when she was taken in by police after being stopped for an identity check after leaving a bunker following an air raid. She said she quickly decided to tell the truth and say that she was Jewish. "The running and hiding was over," she said. "I felt separated from the fate of my people. I had felt guilty every day; had I gone with my mother and my brother, I would at least have known what had happened to them." Friedlaender arrived in June 1944 at the packed Theresienstadt camp. In the spring of 1945, she recalled later, she saw the arrival of skeletal prisoners who had been forced onto death marches from Auschwitz ahead of that camp's liberation . "At that moment, we heard of the death camps, and at that moment I understood that I would not see my mother and my brother again," she said. Both were killed at the Auschwitz death camp. Her father had fled in 1939 to Belgium. He later went to France, where he was interned, before being deported in 1942 to Auschwitz, where he was also killed. Shortly after the camp's liberation, she married Adolf Friedlaender, an acquaintance from Berlin whom she met again at Theresienstadt. He had a sister in America, and — after months in a camp for displaced persons — they arrived in New York in 1946. Friedlaender stayed away from Germany for 57 years. She and her husband became US citizens; she worked as a tailor and later ran a travel agency. Adolf Friedlaender died in 1997, aged 87. Margot returned to Germany for the first time in 2003, when she was received at Berlin's City Hall along with others who had been pushed out by the Nazis. In 2010, she moved back to the German capital, where she told her story to students and was decorated with, among other things, the country's highest honor, the Order of Merit. She was made a citizen of honor of Berlin in 2018. Noting that there were few Holocaust survivors still alive, she told an audience that year: "I would like you to be the witnesses we can't be for much longer."
eNCA
10-05-2025
- General
- eNCA
Margot Friedlaender, Germany's voice of Holocaust remembrance
NEW YORK - German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlaender, who has died at the age of 103, won plaudits at home and abroad for her tireless efforts to foster reconciliation and understanding. Born and raised in Berlin, Friedlaender's family were among the hundreds of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz over the course of World War II. Friedlander herself was interned at the camp in Theresienstadt in the modern-day Czech Republic, but survived the end of the war and emigrated to the United States. The death of her husband, Adolf Friedlaender, and a memoir writing course at a community centre in New York propelled her back to her hometown. Friedlander's prodigal return to Germany, where she dedicated herself to sharing her story with young people, made her one of the most prominent witnesses to the horrors of Adolf Hitler's regime. For her work promoting historical memory, she was given awards and showered by praise from political leaders from both sides of the Atlantic. "Perhaps the generation now that hears me in schools will say something to their children. I have no idea how far that will go," Friedlaender told German broadcaster ARD in 2021. Friedlaender preached for mutual empathy as an antidote to the world's evils. "Don't look at what separates you. Look at what unites you. Be human. Be reasonable," she said in 2024. - 'Try to make your life' - Born Margot Bendheim in 1921 to a family of button makers, young Margot had trained as a fashion illustrator. The family had lived through Hitler's rise to power and witnessed the Kristallnacht pogroms against Jewish businesses in 1938 but remained in Berlin. Friedlaender was 21 in 1943 when the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, came for her 17-year-old brother Ralph. Arriving home, Friedlaender spotted a stranger by the entrance to their building. The young girl covered her Jewish Star of David, passed the man and knocked on a neighbour's door. Soon after, she learnt that her brother had been taken and her mother, Auguste Bendheim, had turned herself in to the police to be by her son. She left Friedlaender a note: "Try to make your life." The invocation would stay with Friedlaender, as would the amber necklace left to her by her mother. Auguste Bendheim and brother Ralph were deported to Auschwitz and killed. Friedlaender's father, she would learn much later, was also murdered in the gas chambers at the camp. Friedlaender lived for more than a year in the underground, dying her hair red, submitting to nasal surgery to appear less Jewish. The people who protected her "risked everything to share a bed or their food with me", she told the Hamburger Abendblatt in 2010. Eventually, she was stopped and asked for her papers. Friedlaender confessed to her Jewish identity and was deported to Theresienstadt. - 'Stay careful' - At the concentration camp, she found Adolf Friedlaender, who she had known through the Jewish community in Berlin. After the Red Army liberated the camp in 1945, he asked her to marry him. A year later, the couple emigrated to the United States and settled in the New York borough of Queens. Adolf worked for Jewish organisations in the city, while Margot worked as a seamstress and a travel agent. AFP | JOHN MACDOUGALL In 1997, Adolf passed away and Friedlaender began taking classes at the 92nd Street Y, where he had worked, including a memoir writing course. At the centre, she met the German producer Thomas Halaczinsky, who, on hearing her recollections, wanted to return with Friedlaender to Berlin to film a documentary. Friedlaender returned to Germany in 2003 for the first time since she left, a step her husband had never been willing to contemplate. The resulting documentary was released in 2004 and her autobiography, whose title reused her mother's words, was published in 2008. In 2010 at the age of 88, Friedlaender decided to move permanently to Berlin and recovered her German citizenship. "I only got back what belonged to me," she said at the time. After her improbable return home, Friedlaender became a voice of moral authority in a country still trying to make amends for the atrocities of the Nazis. AFP | John MACDOUGALL Friedlaender was garlanded with awards, including Germany's federal order of merit, and graced the cover of the German edition of fashion magazine Vogue in 2024. On a visit to Berlin, then US President Joe Biden emotionally told the survivor of the Holocaust he was "actually honoured to be in your presence". In Germany, she dedicated herself to speaking to young people, touring schools and answering questions on her life. "I don't want to know what people's parents or grandparents did," Friedlaender told German weekly Die Zeit around her centenary. "I concentrate on telling them: stay careful, watch that something like that never happens again. Not for me, but for yourselves." Her last public engagement was just a few days before her death, at Berlin city hall, to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. "Be human! That is what I ask you to do: be human!," she said.
Local Germany
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Local Germany
German Holocaust survivor and witness-bearer Margot Friedlaender dies at 103
"With her death Germany has lost one of the most important voices in its contemporary history," a statement from the foundation said. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Friedlaender's death "fills me with deep sadness". "She gave our country the gift of reconciliation, despite everything that the Germans did to her as a young woman," he said. "We cannot be grateful enough" for Friedlaender's efforts. Friedlaender was born in Berlin into a Jewish family of button makers and trained as a fashion illustrator. During the Holocaust she was sent to the Theresienstadt camp in what is now the Czech Republic. While she and her husband Adolf survived and later emigrated to the United States, the rest of her immediate family perished in Auschwitz. After her husband's death she began taking a memoir-writing class and worked on a documentary about her experiences. She went back to Germany for the first time in 2003, and moved permanently to Berlin at the age of 88. Her tireless efforts in keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, particularly by sharing her experiences with younger people, won her plaudits in Germany and beyond. Germany's new Chancellor Friedrich Merz joined those paying tribute on Friday, saying Friedlaender had "entrusted us with her story". Advertisement "It is our task and our duty to carry it forward," he said. Steinmeier had been due to award Friedlaender Germany's highest civilian honour at a ceremony earlier Friday, which was abruptly cancelled. "Until the last, she urged us to defend democracy -- remembering alone is not enough," her foundation said. Her last public appearance was at a ceremony this week to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II at Berlin's city hall, where she repeated what became her mantra. "Be human! That is what I ask you to do: be human!" she said.
