Margot Friedländer, a surviving Holocaust who spent more than 60 years in exile (as she saw) in New York before returning to Germany in 2010 and found her voice as a champion memories of Holocaust – a work that made her celebrity to young Germans and made young Germans and made celebrities and young Germans Last year it landed on the cover of the German Vogue – He died on Friday in Berlin. She was 103.
Her death in the hospital was announced Margot Friedländer Foundationorganization supporting tolerance and democracy.
“It helps me talk about what happened,” she told UNICEF members in 2023.
Mrs. Friedländer and her husband Adolf – known in America as Eddie, for obvious reasons – arrived in New York in the summer of 1946. They settled in a small apartment in Kew Gardens in Queens. Found a job as a controller 92.
The couple married in the camp where they were both interned; Once in America they never talked about their shared experience. Mr. Friedländer was adamant that he never returned to a country that murdered their family. But when he died in 1997, Mrs. Friedländer began to ask what was behind.
She found the community in Y and, at the insistence of Jo Frances Brown, who was then program director, enrolled in the class of memoirs. But it was weeks before she attended. Other students, all Americans, wrote about their families, their children, their pets. One night, the inability to sleep, began to write, and the first stories she told was her earliest memories of childhood.
The stories have become the memory of “” Try to make your Life “: a Jewish girl hiding in Nazi Berlin,” written with Malin Schwerdtfeger and published in Germany in 2008 (English Edition published in 2014.
But she has already found her mission. Thomas Halaczinsky, a documentary filmmaker, heard that Mrs. Friedländer was in mind, and in 2003 he persuaded her to return to Berlin and tell her story when she revised the city where she grew up. Mr. Halaczinski’s film “Can’t Come on Heimweh” – the word is freely translated as “nostalgia” – came out next year.
The experience of returning to Berlin has encouraged her. She felt welcomed by the city that once avoided her. She started talking to young people in schools all over the country, frightening that so many people did not understand the Holocaust.
Mrs. Friedländer was 21 when the Gestapo came for her family. She was on her way home from her work in the night shift at the factory of Abraments and her younger brother Ralph was alone in their apartment. She arrived to find their front door sealed and guarded.
Mrs. Friedländer slipped on her coat, which declared her identity as a Jew, slipped away into the neighboring house. There she learned that her mother had turned to the police so she could be with her sixteen -year -old son, shy and book. She left her daughter with a handbag with a talisman, a necklace of amber beads, directory books, and a short news she added to the neighbor, “Try to create your life.”
She walked the first night for hours and threw herself into a hairdresser in the morning and kept her dark hair stained Titian Red. She spent another 15 months hiding, often stopping for a night or two, relying on the scanned addresses handed over from hand to hand to the Berlin version of the underground railway.
There was an apartment where she stayed inside the moon with a dog for society. A couple who expected sex as rent (Mrs. Friedländer refused). Billet infested with bugs. Gambling day. A man who gave her a cross to wear and take her to a plastic surgeon who straightened her nose for free, so she could walk like a pagan and go to the public. A kind couple with a prosperous black market trade in food.
None of her hosts was Jewish. But it was the Jews who turned her: two men who were so -called Jewish catchers and worked for the Gestapo to save themselves from deportation.
After her capture, Mrs. Friedländer was sent to Theresienstadt, a city in Bohemia that the Germans transformed into Ghetto-Tabor Hybrid Station and Way. It was June 1944. Many detainees were sent to be exterminated, but in Theresienstadt died about 33,000 people where the disease did not check and the food was rare.
There, Mrs. Friedländer met Adolf Friedländer, whom she knew in Berlin in the Jewish Cultural Center, where he was an administrative director and worked as a seamstress in the costume department. At that time she didn’t think much about him. He was 12 years older, surrounded and quiet. She considered him arrogant. But in Theresienstadt they became friends and confidants who disappeared in their disappeared life in Berlin.
When he asked her to take him, she said yes. It was the declining days of the war and their guards began to flee when the Russian army approached.
In June 1945, a rabbi married a prayer cloak held over their heads like a hupah. They found an old porcelain cup that breaks as it requires tradition. Mrs. Friedländer stored a piece.
A year later they sailed to the port of New York. When a statue of Freedom appeared from the fog, Mrs. Friedländer was ambivalent. There was a praised symbol of freedom, but as she wrote in her memory, America did not welcome her family when she needed it most. She was without nationality and would feel for the next six decades.
Anni Margot Bendheim was born on November 5, 1921 in Berlin. Her mother, Auguste (Gross) Bendheim, came from a prosperous family, but was independent and launched her own button, which reluctantly turned, Margot’s father Arthur Bendheim, when they got married. The marriage was unfortunate and the couple divorced when Margot was a teenager.
Margot loved fashion and went to the business school to study the drawing for fashion and advertising. At the beginning of 1937 she began teaching in the salon. The Nuremberg laws were valid for two years and removed the Jews of their rights and businesses. Margot’s mother was desperate to emigrate, but her father, who had two affected siblings, refused. Not only did there be quotas limiting the number of Jewish emigrants to America and other host countries, but the disabilities and diseases were disqualifiers.
After the divorce Auguste desperately worked to find his way out. Many of them were hoping that the leadership had gone out, like papers that promised a man who took his money and disappeared.
Margot and Ralph were taken to work in a factory that created armaments for the German army. During this period, their father emigrated to Belgium, without the circumstances of his ex -wife and children. Later he died of Auschwitz.
It took years for Mrs. Friedländer to learn the fate of her mother and brother. Their death was confirmed in 1959, but it would be another four decades to learn details, from the lists of deportation at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, the archive of German Jewish history. They were also sent to Auschwitz. Her mother was sent to the gas chamber upon arrival; Her brother, a month later.
Mrs. Friedländer moved back to Berlin in 2010. Since then, she has made her mission to tell her story, especially young people. In 2023, the federal cross of merit, the highest honor of the German government.
“She always said she had four lives,” said Mr. Halaczinsky, a filmmaker, in an interview. “Without a movie, I don’t know if she would return to Berlin. But she did it and found a new life. She was a powerful woman; it must have been a huge effort.”
Last summer Mrs. Friedländer appeared on the cover of the German Vogue and shone in a bright red coat. There was only one cover line: the word “love” – the theme of the problem – depicted in the trembling mourning of Mrs. Friedländer, with the signature under him.
She told the magazine that she was “horrified” on the rise of anti -Semitism and far right nationalism. But she warned, “Don’t look at what separates us. Look at what connects us. Be people. Be reasonable.”
