Before returning to Germany in 2010 and finding her voice as a champion of Holocaust memory, Holocaust survivor Margot Friedrader, who spent more than 60 years as an exile in New York City (as she saw it), became a celebrity to the young Germans and landed her in a cover of German Vogue last year. She was 103 years old.
Her death in the hospital was announced by the Margot Friedländer Foundation, an organization that promotes tolerance and democracy.
“It helps me to tell you what happened,” she told members of the UNICEF Club in 2023.
Mr. Friedlender and her husband, Adolf – arrived in New York in the summer of 1946 for obvious reasons known in America as Eddie. They settled in a small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. He found work as director of 92nd Street Y, a cultural center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and she became a travel agency.
The couple were married at camp, where both were interns. Once in America, they never spoke about their shared experiences. Friedlender had given up on never returning to the country where he killed his family. However, when he passed away in 1997, Friedlender began to wonder what was left.
She was finding a community in Y. And, at the urging of Joe Francis Brown, I signed up for a memoir class as I was the program director at the time. However, it was only a few weeks before she joined. Other students, all American-borns, wrote about their families, children and pets. One night, she couldn’t sleep and began writing, and the first story she told was a memory of her early childhood.
The story became a memoir “Let’s Make Your Life: A Jewish Girl Hidden in Nazi Berlin” and was published in Germany in 2008 (the English version was published in 2014).
But she had already found her mission. Thomas Halasinski, the filmmaker for the documentary, had heard that Friedlender was working on a memoir. In 2003, he convinced her to tell her story when she returned to Berlin and revisited the city she grew up in. Halaczinsky’s film “Don’t Call You Heimweh” – the phrase loosely translated as “nostalgia” – appeared the following year.
Her experience returning to Berlin has messed up her. She felt welcomed by the city that once shunned her. She began talking to young people from schools across the country and was surprised that many people didn’t understand the Holocaust.
Friedlender was 21 years old when the Gestapo came for her family. She was on her way home from a night shift job at an armed factory, and her younger brother, Ralph, was alone in their apartment. She arrives to find their front door sealed and protected.
Ms. Friedlender slid down into her neighbor’s house, hiding a yellow star in her coat, which declared her identity as a Jew. There, she learns that her mother has turned herself to the police so that she can be with her shy, book-like child, her 16-year-old son. She garnered her daughter a handbag and left an Amberbees necklace, address book and a short message from her neighbor.
She walked for hours that first night, and in the morning she was dressed in a hair salon and dyed her dark hair Tituan red. She spent the next 15 months in secret, often only stopping at a night or two.
There was an apartment that enveloped ranked filth, which she had stayed in for months with her dog for the company. A couple who were hoping for sex as rent (Freedrender declined). Bed bugs have invaded the billet. Gambling nest. The man who wore her a cross and took her to a plastic surgeon straightened her nose for free, allowing her to pass by as a gentile and venture out in public. A kind couple doing business in a black market thriving in food.
None of her hosts were Jewish. However, it was Jews who surround her. They were two so-called Jewish catchers, and two men who worked in the Gestapo to protect themselves from deportation.
After her capture, Friedlender was sent to Teresienstadt, a Bohemia town where Germans converted to Hybrid Ghetto Camp and Way Station. It was June 1944. Many detainees were shipped out to escape, but about 33,000 people died in Thelesienstadt.
There, Friedlender met with Adolf Friedlender. Adolf Friedlender was known in Berlin at the Jewish Cultural Center where he worked as an administrative director and tailor in the costume department. She didn’t think much of him at the time. He was 12 years old, wearing glasses and implicitly. She thought he was rog arrogant. But in Thelesienstadt they became friends and confidants, staring closely at the disappearing lives of Berlin.
When he asked her to marry him, she said yes. It was a waning day of war, and their guards began to flee as the Russians approached.
They married the rabbis in June 1945, and the mantle of prayer was embraced as a huppah on their heads. They found an old porcelain cup to break, as tradition requires. Freedrender saved the work.
A year later, they sailed to New York Port. When the Statue of Liberty emerged from the mist, Friedlender was vague. This was a symbol of pride in freedom, but as she wrote in her memoirs, America did not welcome her family when they needed them most. She was stateless and she felt that way for the next 60 years.
Anni Margot Bendheim was born in Berlin on November 5th, 1921. Her mother, Auguste (Gross) Bendheim, came from a thriving family, but had an independent heart and when she got married she reluctantly started a business of button making that she reluctantly turned over by Margot’s father, Arthur Bendheim. The marriage was unhappy and the couple divorced when Margot was a teenager.
Margot loves fashion and she went to trade school to study painting for fashion and advertising. In early 1937, she began apprenticeship at a dress salon. Nuremberg’s laws remained in effect for two years, stripping Jews of their rights and businesses. Margot’s mother was eager to move, but her father, who had two disabled siblings, refused. Not only did they have a quota limiting the number of Jewish immigrants to the US and other host countries, but they were disqualified from disability and illness.
After the divorce, Auguste worked desperately to find a way. Many wanted a vaporized lead, like a paper promised by a man who took the money and disappeared.
Margot and Ralph were drafted to work in the factory that built German troops. During this period, their father moved to Belgium, paying attention to the situation of his previous wife and children. He would later die in Auschwitz.
It took Friedlender years for her to learn about her mother and siblings’ fate. Their deaths were confirmed in 1959, but it would be another 40 years before she learned more from the deportation list at the Leo Beck Institute in New York City, an archive of German Jewish history. They were also sent to Auschwitz. Her mother had been sent to the gas chamber upon arrival. Her brother, a month later.
Friedlender returned to Berlin in 2010. Since then, she has created her mission to tell her stories, especially to young people. In 2023, she was awarded the Federal Government Cross, the highest honor of the German government.
“She always said that she has four lives,” filmmaker Harasinski said in an interview. “I don’t know if she’d returned to Berlin without the film. But she did. She found a new life. She was a powerful woman. It must have been a great effort.”
Last summer, Friedlender appeared on the cover of Vogue in Germany, shining in a bright red coat. There was only one cover line. The word “love” (the theme of the question) is rendered in Friedrender’s unstable cursive, under which her signature is.
She told the magazine that she was “applauded” by the rise of anti-Semitism and far-right nationalism. But she warned: “Don’t look at what separates us. Look at what binds us together. Be people. Be wise.”
