Margot Friedländer, a Holocaust survivor who spent greater than 60 years in exile (as she noticed it) in New York Metropolis earlier than returning to Germany in 2010 and discovering her voice as a champion of Holocaust remembrance — work that made her a star to younger Germans and landed her on the cover of German Vogue last year — died on Friday in Berlin. She was 103.
Her loss of life, in a hospital, was introduced by the Margot Friedländer Foundation, a company selling tolerance and democracy.
“It helps me to speak about what occurred,” she informed the members of a UNICEF Membership in 2023. “You younger individuals assist me since you hear. I don’t bottle it up anymore. I share my story for all of you.”
Ms. Friedländer and her husband, Adolf — recognized in America as Eddie, for apparent causes — arrived in New York in the summertime of 1946. They settled right into a small house in Kew Gardens, Queens. He discovered work as comptroller of the 92nd Avenue Y, the cultural middle on the Higher East Facet of Manhattan, and she or he turned a journey agent.
The couple had married on the camp the place they have been each interned; as soon as in America, they by no means spoke of their shared expertise. Mr. Friedländer was adamant about by no means returning to the nation that had murdered their households. However when he died in 1997, Ms. Friedländer started to surprise what had been left behind.
She had discovered a neighborhood on the Y, and, on the urging of Jo Frances Brown, who was then this system director there, she signed up for a memoir-writing class. It was weeks earlier than she participated, nonetheless. The opposite college students, all American-born, have been writing about their households, their kids, their pets. One night time, unable to sleep, she started to jot down, and the primary tales she informed have been her earliest childhood recollections.
The tales turned a memoir, “‘Attempt to Make Your Life’: A Jewish Woman Hiding in Nazi Berlin,” written with Malin Schwerdtfeger and printed in Germany in 2008. (An English-language version got here out in 2014.)
However she had already discovered her mission. Thomas Halaczinsky, a documentary filmmaker, had heard that Ms. Friedländer was engaged on a memoir, and in 2003 he persuaded her to return to Berlin and inform her story as she revisited the town the place she had grown up. Mr. Halaczinsky’s movie, “Don’t Name It Heimweh” — the phrase interprets loosely as “nostalgia” — got here out the following yr.
The expertise of returning to Berlin galvanized her. She felt welcomed by the town that had as soon as shunned her. She started chatting with younger individuals in faculties across the nation, startled that so many had no understanding of the Holocaust.
Ms. Friedländer was 21 when the Gestapo got here for her household. She was on her method house from her job on the night time shift in an armaments manufacturing unit, and her youthful brother, Ralph, had been alone of their house. She arrived to seek out their entrance door sealed and guarded.
Hiding the yellow star on her coat that proclaimed her id as a Jew, Ms. Friedländer slipped away to a neighbor’s home. There, she discovered that her mom had turned herself in to the police so she might be along with her 16-year-old son, a shy and bookish little one. She had left her daughter her purse with a talisman, a necklace of amber beads, an deal with ebook and a short message, delivered by the neighbor: “Attempt to make your life.”
She walked for hours that first night time, and within the morning she ducked right into a hair salon and had her darkish hair dyed Titian purple. She spent the following 15 months in hiding, typically stopping for only a night time or two, counting on scribbled addresses handed from hand at hand, following the Berlin model of the Underground Railroad.
There was the rank, filth-encrusted house the place she stayed inside for months, with a canine for firm. The couple that anticipated intercourse as lease (Ms. Friedländer declined). The billet infested with bedbugs. The playing den. The person who gave her a cross to put on and took her to a plastic surgeon who straightened her nostril without cost, so she might go as a gentile and enterprise out in public. The kindly couple with a thriving black-market enterprise in meals.
None of her hosts have been Jewish. But it surely was Jews who turned her in: two males who have been so-called Jewish catchers, working for the Gestapo to avoid wasting themselves from deportation.
After her seize, Ms. Friedländer was despatched to Theresienstadt, a city in Bohemia that the Germans had transformed to a hybrid ghetto-camp and way station. It was June 1944. Many detainees have been shipped away to be exterminated, however some 33,000 individuals died at Theresienstadt, the place illness was rampant and meals was scarce.
There, Ms. Friedländer met up with Adolf Friedländer, whom she had recognized in Berlin at a Jewish cultural middle the place he was the executive director and she or he labored as a seamstress within the costume division. She hadn’t thought a lot of him on the time. He was 12 years older, bespectacled and taciturn. She discovered him smug. However at Theresienstadt, they turned buddies and confidants, poring over their vanished life in Berlin.
When he requested her to marry him, she mentioned sure. It was the waning days of the battle, and their guards had begun to flee because the Russian Military approached.
They have been married by a rabbi in June 1945, with a prayer mantle held over their heads as a huppah. They discovered an outdated porcelain cup to smash, as custom required. Ms. Friedländer saved a chunk.
A yr later, they sailed into New York Harbor. When the Statue of Liberty emerged from the fog, Ms. Friedländer was ambivalent. Right here was the vaunted image of liberty, however, as she wrote in her memoir, America had not welcomed her household after they wanted it most. She was stateless, and she or he would really feel that method for the following six a long time.
Anni Margot Bendheim was born on Nov. 5, 1921, in Berlin. Her mom, Auguste (Gross) Bendheim, got here from a affluent household however was independent-minded and had began her personal button-making enterprise that she turned over, reluctantly, to Margot’s father, Arthur Bendheim, after they married. The wedding was sad, and the couple divorced when Margot was a youngster.
Margot cherished style, and she or he went to commerce faculty to check drawing for style and promoting. Early in 1937, she started apprenticing at a gown salon. The Nuremberg Legal guidelines had been in impact for 2 years, stripping Jews of their rights and companies. Margot’s mom was determined to to migrate, however her father, who had two disabled siblings, refused. Not solely have been there quotas limiting the variety of Jewish émigrés to America and different host international locations, however incapacity and sickness have been disqualifiers.
After the divorce, Auguste labored feverishly to discover a method out. Many hoped-for leads evaporated, just like the papers promised by a person who took their cash and vanished.
Margot and Ralph have been conscripted to work in a manufacturing unit that made armaments for the German navy. Throughout this era, their father emigrated to Belgium, heedless of the circumstances of his former spouse and youngsters. He would later die at Auschwitz.
It took years for Ms. Friedländer to study her mom and brother’s destiny. Their deaths have been confirmed in 1959, however it might be one other 4 a long time earlier than she discovered the main points, from the deportation lists on the Leo Baeck Institute in New York Metropolis, an archive of German Jewish historical past. That they had additionally been despatched to Auschwitz. Her mom had been despatched to the gasoline chamber upon arrival; her brother, a month later.
Ms. Friedländer moved again to Berlin in 2010. Since then, she had made it her mission to inform her story, particularly to younger individuals. In 2023, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Benefit, the German authorities’s highest honor.
“She at all times mentioned she had 4 lives,” Mr. Halaczinsky, the filmmaker, mentioned in an interview. “With out the movie, I don’t know if she would have gone again to Berlin. However she did, and she or he discovered a brand new life. She was a robust lady; it will need to have been an amazing effort.”
Final summer time, Ms. Friedländer appeared on the quilt of German Vogue, beaming in a shiny purple coat. There was just one cowl line: the phrase “love” — the theme of the difficulty — rendered in Ms. Friedländer’s shaky cursive, along with her signature beneath it.
She informed the journal she was “appalled” on the rise of antisemitism and far-right nationalism. However she cautioned: “Look not towards what separates us. Look towards what brings us collectively. Be individuals. Be wise.”
