Margot Friedländer, a survivor to the Holocaust who spent more than 60 years in exile (as he saw it) in New York City before returning to Germany in 2010 and finding his voice as a champion of the memory of the Holocaust – the work that made it a celebrity for the young Germans and made him land on the cover of the German vogue last year – died on Friday in Berlin. He had 103.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Margot Friedländer Foundation, an organization that promotes tolerance and democracy.
“It helps me to talk about what happened,” he told members of a UNICEF club in 2023. “Young people help me because they listen to. They don't make him back anymore. I share my story for all of you.”
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 the Kew gardens, in Queens. He found work as a controller of the 92nd Street Y, the cultural center in Manhattan's Upper East Side, and became a travel agent.
The couple had married to the field where they were both internal; Once in America, they never talked about their shared experience. Mr. Friedländer was adamant of never returning to the country who had killed their families. But when he died in 1997, Mrs. Friedländer started wondering what had been left behind.
He had found a community at the Y and, for the request of Jo Frances Brown, who was then the director of the program there, he enrolled for a memories of memories. Weeks passed before he participated, however. The other students, all of American origin, were writing about their families, their children, their pets. One night, unable to sleep, he began to write and the first stories he told were his first childhood memories.
The stories have become a memories book, “” Try to make your life “: a Jewish girl who hides in the Nazi of Berlin”, written with Malin Schwerdtfeger and published in Germany in 2008. (An edition in English came out in 2014.)
But he had already found his mission. Thomas Halaczinsky, a documentary director, had heard that Mrs. Friedländer was working on a memories book, and in 2003 she persuaded her to return to Berlin and tell her story as she was revisiting the city where she had grown up. Mr. Halaczinsky's film, “Don't call him Heimweh” – the word freely translates as “nostalgia” – came out the following year.
The experience of returning to Berlin galvanized her. He felt welcomed by the city that he had once avoided it. He started talking to young people in schools all over the country, surprised by the fact that so many had no understanding of the Holocaust.
Mrs. Friedländer was 21 years old when the Gestapo arrived for her family. He was returning home since his work in the night shift in an armament factory and his younger brother, Ralph, had been only in their apartment. It came to find the door -to -entry door and kept.
Hiding the yellow star on her coat that proclaimed her identity as a Jew, Mrs. Friedländer slipped away from a neighbor's house. There, he learned that his mother had given herself to the police so that she could be with her 16 -year -old son, a shy girl and bookish. He had left his daughter his purse with a talisman, a necklace of Ambra pearls, a column and a short message, delivered by the neighbor: “Try to create you”.
He walked for hours that first night, and in the morning he lowered himself in a hairdresser and had his dark hair dyed red. He spent the next 15 months to hide, often stopping only for one night or two, relying on hazardous addresses passed by hand, following the Berlin version of the underground railway.
There was the rank, apartment encrusted from dirt where he stayed inside for months, with a dog for company. The couple who expected sex like rent (Mrs. Friedländer decreased). The billet infested with bedbugs. The den of gambling. The man who gave her a cross to wear and brought her to a plastic surgeon who has straightened his nose for free, so that he can pass like a kind and venture into public. The kind couple with a thriving activity of the black market in food.
None of his guests was Jewish. But they were Jewish to turn: two men who were so -called Jewish catcher, who worked for the gestapo to save themselves from deportation.
After his capture, Mrs. Friedländer was sent to Theresienstadt, a city in Bohemia that the Germans had converted into a hybrid station of Ghetto and away. It was June 1944. Many inmates were shipped to be exterminated, but about 33,000 people died in Theresienstadt, where the disease was rampant and the food was scarce.
There, Mrs. Friedländer met Adolf Friedländer, who had known in Berlin in a Jewish cultural center where he was administrative director and worked as a seamstress in the Department of Costumes. He hadn't thought much about him at that moment. He was 12 years older, plotted and taciturn. He found him arrogant. But in Theresienstadt, they became friends and confidents, taking their life disappeared in Berlin.
When he asked her to marry him, he said yes. They were the grilled days of the war and their guards had started to escape while the Russian army approached.
They married a rabbi in June 1945, with a prayer cloak held above his head like Huppah. They found an old cup of porcelain to break through, as required by tradition. Mrs. Friedländer saved a piece.
A year later, they sailed in the port of New York. When the statue of freedom emerged from the fog, Mrs. Friedländer was ambivalent. Here was the praised symbol of freedom, but, as he wrote in his memories book, America had not welcomed his family when they needed it more. It was stateless and he felt like this for the next six decades.
Years Margot Bendheim was born on November 5, 1921 in Berlin. Her mother, Augustte (gross) Bendheim, came from a prosperous family but had an independent mentality and had started her activity of production of buttoning that she shot, with reluctance, to the father of Margot, Arthur Bendheim, when they got married. The wedding was unhappy and the couple divorced when Margot was a teenager.
Margot loved fashion and went to commercial school to study drawing for fashion and advertising. At the beginning of 1937, he began to learn in a clothing hall. The laws of Nuremberg were in force for two years, stripping the Jews of their rights and activities. Margot's mother was desperate to emigrate, but her father, who had two disabled brothers, refused. Not only were they limiting us the number of Jewish emigrants to America and other host countries, but disability and disease were disqualifiers.
After the divorce, Augustte worked feverly to find a way out. Many hoped for Lead evaporated, like the documents promised by a man who took their money and vanished.
Margot and Ralph were enrolled to work in a factory that made armaments for the German military. During this period, the father emigrated to Belgium, regardless of the circumstances of his ex -wife and children. Later he would died in Auschwitz.
It took years for Mrs. Friedländer to learn the fate of her mother and brother. Their deaths were confirmed in 1959, but four other decades would pass before learning the details, from the deportation lists to 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 on arrival; His brother, a month later.
Mrs. Friedländer returned to Berlin in 2010. Since then, she had made her mission to tell her story, especially to young people. In 2023, the federal cross of merit was assigned, the highest honor of the German government.
“He always said he had four lives,” said Halaczinsky, the director, in an interview. “Without the film, I don't know if he would return to Berlin. But he did it, and he found a new life. He was a powerful woman; he must have been a huge effort.”
Last summer, Mrs. Friedländer appeared on the cover of German Vogue, radiant in a bright red coat. There was only one cover line: the word “love” – the theme of the problem – rendered in the shaky cutway of Mrs. Friedländer, with her signature under it.
He told the magazine that he was “upset” to the rise of anti -Semitism and far -right nationalism. But he warned: “Don't look at what separates us. Look at what he unites us. Be people. Be sensible.”