Latest news with #MargotFriedländer
Irish Times
17-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Margot Friedländer's family were murdered in Auschwitz. She returned to Berlin at 88 with a message
Diminutive and disarming, Margot Friedländer was the Holocaust survivor modern Germany needed. When she was laid to rest on Thursday in Berlin, 103 years after she was born here as Anni Margot Bendheim, the mourners included all of Germany's highest representatives. Public television covered the funeral, marking the end of not one, but four distinct lives. The last life began in 2010 when, as a sprightly 88 year-old widow, Friedländer left New York after six decades and returned to her birth city. After decades of silence, Friedländer began visiting schools to tell goggle-eyed German children about her family – her estranged parents and their button factory, her gifted brother Ralph who loved books and the violin. And the day when her life fell apart. After several failed attempts to escape the growing Nazi persecution, the net finally closed on January 20th, 1943. When the Gestapo secret police collected 17-year-old Ralph, a neighbour told Margot her mother had gone to the local police station to follow her son 'wherever that might be'. READ MORE Arriving later, a neighbour gave Margot her mother's amber necklace, which she wore until the end of her life, and a message: 'Make something of your life.' The lives of her parents and brother, she found out later, ended in Auschwitz. Margot went into hiding, living with 16 families over 15 months with a false identity, raven hair and a new nose. Eventually she was denounced and sent to Theresienstadt camp. There she met Adolf Friedländer, an acquaintance from Berlin. They survived hunger and disease and were married in the camp in June 1945, six weeks after its liberation. A year later the couple were on a boat to New York but Margot never warmed to her adoptive home. After a first visit back to Berlin in 2003 she moved back permanently seven years later. She was a bundle of energy, visiting schools several times a week to tell her story and deliver a simple, elegant message. 'There is no Christian, Jewish or Muslim blood, just human blood,' she said. 'People killed millions of people because they didn't see their victims as people. It is your task to make sure, in future, that nothing ever happens like what we experienced. My message is simple: be human.' Even before her death, and the last week of moving tributes, it's not clear that everyone in Germany understood the meaning of Friedländer's return. Why, they asked repeatedly and disbelievingly, had she moved back to the 'land of the perpetrators'? 'I don't see it that way, I love Germany, it is my home, I was born here and I have the right to be here,' she said in a 2021 interview. 'I don't have to excuse or explain myself that the circle of my life should close again in Berlin.' Friedländer was here because she wanted to be and was entitled to be, after Germany returned the citizenship stolen by the Nazis. Not everyone understood that but they liked having her around anyway. In her final years, Friedländer became something of a celebrity. She made the cover of German Vogue and was a regular guest at Berlin parties and premieres where, Friedländer joked, she was making up for her lost party years as a young woman. A photographer friend who worked many such events noticed how often guests were anxious to get their selfie with Margot, then left her sitting alone in a corner. Friedländer didn't seem to mind, happy to use any platform available to spread her simple, profound message: be human. As one of the last survivors of the Holocaust, Friedländer was surprised at the implied forgiveness sought of her. Those who persecuted her, she told their grandchildren, were dead. And even if they were alive, such forgiveness could never come because, at least in the Jewish tradition, those who could forgive them were murdered. Instead Friedländer asked her questioners questions, wondering aloud why so many people supported dehumanising Nazi era policies, ducked out of sight or remained silent. 'Why? That is the great question that no one can answer for me and which torments me.' New questions tormented Friedländer in her final years: why one in four support a party that views the Nazi era and its staggering crimes as 'birdshit' in the otherwise glorious sweep of German history. Why anti-Semitic resentment and anti-democratic agitation are once more on the rise in Germany. [ German president tackles uncomfortable statistic: every second German favours 'drawing a line' under Nazi past Opens in new window ] Margot Friedländer did not return to Berlin to forgive the Germans or make them feel better about themselves and a past that cannot be changed. Instead she asked them to honour the memory of that time alive by learning its lessons: be human, reject hate, dehumanisation and exclusion now and in the future. In the polarised atmosphere of Germany's post-October 7th moral maze, the outcome is open.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Margot Friedländer, one of last Holocaust survivors, buried in Berlin
Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer, one of the last living Jewish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, was buried at a Jewish cemetery in Berlin on Thursday, with close friends, family and German leaders all gathered to pay their respects. Friedländer died on Friday at the age of 103. Thanks to her tireless efforts to make sure the atrocities of the Holocaust are never forgotten, she became one of the best known survivors in her native Germany, dedicating the final decades of her life to campaigning for democracy and humanity. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and former leader Angela Merkel were among the high-profile guests in attendance at the funeral service in Berlin's Weissensee district. Former chancellor Olaf Scholz, who passed on the baton to Merz last week, also attended the funeral service, along with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, parliamentary president Julia Klöckner and Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner. Other prominent guests in attendance included Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Springer, a Berlin-based multinational media company that owns outlets including Germany's Bild tabloid and US political news site Politico. Fight for survival Friedländer, who was born in Berlin in 1921, went into hiding in the city and was eventually sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944, in what was then Czechoslovakia. Her father, mother and brother were killed at Auschwitz. She and her husband, whom she met at Theresienstadt, emigrated to the United States in 1946. After her husband died, she started to visit Berlin in the 2000s and moved back permanently in 2010 at age 88. She worked tirelessly to inform young people in Germany about the Nazi regime. A prize for school projects on the Holocaust and today's culture of remembrance bears her name. "Hate is alien to me," Friedländer once said. Her aim was to give a voice to the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In June 2018, at the age of 96, she was named an honorary citizen of Berlin. To mark her 100th birthday, a book and an illustrated biography were published. In 2011, she was awarded Germany's highest civilian honour - the Order of Merit - given for outstanding service to the nation. Buried in honorary grave Speakers paid tribute to Friedländer's extraordinary life story and achievements, with the rabbi of the Chabad Jewish community in Berlin, Yehuda Teichtal, describing her story as "one of strength and unbreakable humanity." Her legacy teaches us to always try to make the world a more humane and better place, Teichtal added. The chairman of the Jewish Community of Berlin, Gideon Joffe, recalled that despite losing her family to the Nazis, she "emerged as someone who wasn't looking to hate, but to remember, who wasn't looking to accuse, but to tell." Leeor Engländer, a close friend of Friedländer's, said her famous call to "Be human!" had reached generations of Germans. In his eulogy, he also noted the immense effort it took his friend to fight against indifference and frustration. The trauma of her experiences during the Holocaust never left her, even though she always appeared positive on the outside, said Engländer, adding that Friedländer had been constantly plagued by thoughts of what had become of all the children who had been sent to the gas chambers. Following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, she was horrified about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany. "This is how it started with us back then," she told her friend. Following the service, Friedländer was buried in an honorary grave at Berlin's Weissensee cemetery, one of the largest Jewish graveyards in Europe.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer honoured for life achievements
Several speakers at the funeral service for Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer in Berlin have paid tribute to her efforts to promote humanity and stand up against hatred. The chairman of the Jewish Community of Berlin, Gideon Joffe, recalled Friedländer's mother, father and brother were all murdered by the Nazis and that she survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp. "But from this past, you emerged as someone who wasn't looking to hate, but to remember, who wasn't looking to accuse, but to tell," said Joffe. Friedländer, who passed away on Friday aged 103, symbolized warmth, approachability and compassion, traits that make a person human, he said. The rabbi of the Chabad Jewish community in Berlin, Yehuda Teichtal, described Friedländer's story as "one of strength and unbreakable humanity." Her legacy teaches us to always try to make the world a more humane and better place, Teichtal added. Friedländer was one of the last living Jewish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and among the best known in Germany, thanks to her outspokenness and tireless campaigning to make sure the atrocities committed during the Holocaust will never be repeated.
New York Post
11-05-2025
- General
- New York Post
German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer, revered for her strong voice against antisemitism, dead at 103
One of Germany's most prominent Holocaust survivors died at the age of 103 on Friday — just one day after the country marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Margot Friedländer, who was 23-years-old when she was captured after 15 months in hiding and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, died in Berlin on the same day she was honored with the Grand Cross of Merit, Germany's highest honor, her foundation announced. The cause of her death was not immediately clear. 4 German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer died at the age of 103 Friday. AFP via Getty Images 'Margot Friedländer was one of the strongest voices of our time: for peaceful coexistence, against anti-Semitism and forgetting,' German Chancellor Friedrich Merz posted on X Friday. 'She entrusted us with her story. It is our task and our duty to pass it on. We mourn with her family and friends.' 4 German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier credited Friedländer for restoring reconciliation in Germany. AFP via Getty Images Friedländer was born Margot Bendheim on Nov. 5, 1921, in Berlin, and was an aspiring dressmaker and fashion designer until she changed her appearance and went into hiding in January 1943 after her mother and brother were hauled away and later murdered at Auschwitz. Her father, a decorated war veteran who fought in World War I, was killed by the Nazis in 1942. Friedländer was captured in April 1944 and arrived at Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, two months later, where she witnessed the emaciated prisoners who had been forced on death marches from Auschwitz ahead of its liberation. 4 Friedländer holds her Jewish Start of David she had to wear in Nazi Germany. AFP via Getty Images There she also met Adolf Friedländer – and they married shortly after the camp was liberated. The pair moved to New York in 1946 and became US citizens. She worked as a tailor and later ran a travel agency until she decided to return to her native country 64 years later. 4 Flowers lie next to the Stolperstein memorial marker for Friedländer. AP Friedländer visited Germany for the first time in 2003 — six years after she was widowed — and eventually moved back to Berlin in 2018, and spent her remaining years speaking out against the atrocities, hate and antisemitism she witnessed and experienced. 'She gave our country the gift of reconciliation – despite everything the Germans had done to her as a young person,' German President Frank-Walter Steimer said in a statement. 'We cannot be grateful enough for this gift.' With Post wires
New York Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Margot Friedländer, Holocaust Survivor Who Found Her Voice, Dies at 103
Margot Friedländer, a Holocaust survivor who spent more than 60 years in exile (as she saw it) in New York City before returning to Germany in 2010 and finding her voice as a champion of Holocaust remembrance — work that made her a celebrity to young Germans and landed her on the cover of German Vogue last year — died on Friday in Berlin. She was 103. Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Margot Friedländer Foundation, an organization promoting tolerance and democracy. 'It helps me to talk about what happened,' she told the members of a UNICEF Club in 2023. 'You young people help me because you listen. I don't bottle it up anymore. I share my story for all of you.' Ms. Friedländer and her husband, Adolf — known in America as Eddie, for obvious reasons — arrived in New York in the summer of 1946. They settled into a small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. He found work as comptroller of the 92nd Street Y, the cultural center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and she became a travel agent. The couple had married at the camp where they were both interned; once in America, they never spoke of their shared experience. Mr. Friedländer was adamant about never returning to the country that had murdered their families. But when he died in 1997, Ms. Friedländer began to wonder what had been left behind. She had found a community at the Y, and, at the urging of Jo Frances Brown, who was then the program director there, she signed up for a memoir-writing class. It was weeks before she participated, however. The other students, all American-born, were writing about their families, their children, their pets. One night, unable to sleep, she began to write, and the first stories she told were her earliest childhood memories. The stories became a memoir, ''Try to Make Your Life': A Jewish Girl Hiding in Nazi Berlin,' written with Malin Schwerdtfeger and published in Germany in 2008. (An English-language edition came out in 2014.) But she had already found her mission. Thomas Halaczinsky, a documentary filmmaker, had heard that Ms. Friedländer was working on a memoir, and in 2003 he persuaded her to return to Berlin and tell her story as she revisited the city where she had grown up. Mr. Halaczinsky's film, 'Don't Call It Heimweh' — the word translates loosely as 'nostalgia' — came out the next year. The experience of returning to Berlin galvanized her. She felt welcomed by the city that had once shunned her. She began speaking to young people in schools around the country, startled that so many had no understanding of the Holocaust. Ms. Friedländer was 21 when the Gestapo came for her family. She was on her way home from her job on the night shift in an armaments factory, and her younger brother, Ralph, had been alone in their apartment. She arrived to find their front door sealed and guarded. Hiding the yellow star on her coat that proclaimed her identity as a Jew, Ms. Friedländer slipped away to a neighbor's house. There, she learned that her mother had turned herself in to the police so she could be with her 16-year-old son, a shy and bookish child. She had left her daughter her handbag with a talisman, a necklace of amber beads, an address book and a brief message, delivered by the neighbor: 'Try to make your life.' She walked for hours that first night, and in the morning she ducked into a hair salon and had her dark hair dyed Titian red. She spent the next 15 months in hiding, often stopping for just a night or two, relying on scribbled addresses passed from hand to hand, following the Berlin version of the Underground Railroad. There was the rank, filth-encrusted apartment where she stayed inside for months, with a dog for company. The couple that expected sex as rent (Ms. Friedländer declined). The billet infested with bedbugs. The gambling den. The man who gave her a cross to wear and took her to a plastic surgeon who straightened her nose for free, so she could pass as a gentile and venture out in public. The kindly couple with a thriving black-market business in food. None of her hosts were Jewish. But it was Jews who turned her in: two men who were so-called Jewish catchers, working for the Gestapo to save themselves from deportation. After her capture, Ms. Friedländer was sent to Theresienstadt, a town in Bohemia that the Germans had converted to a hybrid ghetto-camp and way station. It was June 1944. Many detainees were shipped away to be exterminated, but some 33,000 people died at Theresienstadt, where disease was rampant and food was scarce. There, Ms. Friedländer met up with Adolf Friedländer, whom she had known in Berlin at a Jewish cultural center where he was the administrative director and she worked as a seamstress in the costume department. She hadn't thought much of him at the time. He was 12 years older, bespectacled and taciturn. She found him arrogant. But at Theresienstadt, they became friends and confidants, poring over their vanished life in Berlin. When he asked her to marry him, she said yes. It was the waning days of the war, and their guards had begun to flee as the Russian Army approached. They were married by a rabbi in June 1945, with a prayer mantle held over their heads as a huppah. They found an old porcelain cup to smash, as tradition required. Ms. Friedländer saved a piece. A year later, they sailed into New York Harbor. When the Statue of Liberty emerged from the fog, Ms. Friedländer was ambivalent. Here was the vaunted symbol of liberty, but, as she wrote in her memoir, America had not welcomed her family when they needed it most. She was stateless, and she would feel that way for the next six decades. Anni Margot Bendheim was born on Nov. 5, 1921, in Berlin. Her mother, Auguste (Gross) Bendheim, came from a prosperous family but was independent-minded and had started her own button-making business that she turned over, reluctantly, to Margot's father, Arthur Bendheim, when they married. The marriage was unhappy, and the couple divorced when Margot was a teenager. Margot loved fashion, and she went to trade school to study drawing for fashion and advertising. Early in 1937, she began apprenticing at a dress salon. The Nuremberg Laws had been in effect for two years, stripping Jews of their rights and businesses. Margot's mother was desperate to emigrate, but her father, who had two disabled siblings, refused. Not only were there quotas restricting the number of Jewish émigrés to America and other host countries, but disability and illness were disqualifiers. After the divorce, Auguste worked desperately to find a way out. Many hoped-for leads evaporated, like the papers promised by a man who took their money and vanished. Margot and Ralph were conscripted to work in a factory that made armaments for the German military. During this period, their father emigrated to Belgium, heedless of the circumstances of his former wife and children. He would later die at Auschwitz. It took years for Ms. Friedländer to learn her mother and brother's fate. Their deaths were confirmed in 1959, but it would be another four decades before she learned the details, from the deportation lists at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, an archive of German Jewish history. They had also been sent to Auschwitz. Her mother had been sent to the gas chamber upon arrival; her brother, a month later. Ms. Friedländer moved back to Berlin in 2010. Since then, she had made it her mission to tell her story, especially to young people. In 2023, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, the German government's highest honor. 'She always said she had four lives,' Mr. Halaczinsky, the filmmaker, said in an interview. 'Without the film, I don't know if she would have gone back to Berlin. But she did, and she found a new life. She was a powerful woman; it must have been a tremendous effort.' Last summer, Ms. Friedländer appeared on the cover of German Vogue, beaming in a bright red coat. There was only one cover line: the word 'love' — the theme of the issue — rendered in Ms. Friedländer's shaky cursive, with her signature below it. She told the magazine she was 'appalled' at the rise of antisemitism and far-right nationalism. But she cautioned: 'Look not toward what separates us. Look toward what brings us together. Be people. Be sensible.'
