“Be human”: With Margot Friedländer, a great Berliner died

"Be human," Margot Friedländer said in Berlin on Wednesday. On Friday, the heart of perhaps the most well-known Holocaust survivor in recent years stopped beating. She spent her last decade and a half back in the Berlin she loved so much – without any resentment, despite the suffering she endured under theNazis .

You know people like that: When there are events on a particular topic, they're always there – because without them, something is missing. One of these people was Margot Friedländer, in relation to Holocaust remembrance. Before the pandemic, she had traveled tirelessly, bearing witness – especially in Berlin schools. "For me, nothing – not the Federal Cross of Merit or the other honors – is more important than young people," she once said.

Margot Friedländer traveled up to three times a week, speaking to young people. She called it her mission. "I don't want to know what your grandparents did," she said. "I'm here to tell you that I don't want you to ever be confronted with something like that." Something like that—that was persecution during the Nazi era, the Holocaust.

In 1921, the Jewish woman was born Anni Margot Bendheim in Berlin. After her parents' divorce in 1937, she moved with her mother and younger brother to live with her grandparents. She said she had a happy childhood and youth. The family had a summer house on Scharmützelsee, and Margot trained as a fashion designer. She wanted to design clothes; her family owned a button factory that supplied the Jewish fashion studios in the area around Hausvogteiplatz in Mitte, the Jewish textile district. In 1943, her mother and younger brother were taken away while she was still working in the factory. They were later murdered in Auschwitz . Her father—who had abandoned the family—was killed in 1942.

The mother left her daughter an amber necklace and a message: "Try to make a living." She tried to survive underground, to avoid attracting attention, to survive. To achieve this, she dyed her hair red, for example, to look as "un-Jewish" as possible. Eventually, the Gestapo discovered her; a female arrester had betrayed her, and she was deported to Theresienstadt.

With a will to survive and luck, she survived and was liberated in 1945. Shortly after the liberation, she married Adolf Friedländer, a man from the Cultural Association who had also been imprisoned in Theresienstadt and whom she had already known from Berlin. Together they emigrated to the USA. There she worked as a seamstress and later managed a travel agency.

Back to my hometown in Berlin – without resentment

When she returned to Berlin to make a documentary, she felt at home again. It wasn't negative emotions that affected her, but rather the fond memories of the city where she was born in 1921. She left her apartment in New York and moved to Berlin at the age of 88. Thus, she spent her final years in "her" Berlin—the city of the perpetrators of the Nazis, with whom she has since reconciled.

"I'm happy, every day, every hour, that I've come back," she once said. "I don't hate Germans. I am German. I belong here, I have nothing to forgive." She focuses on those born later. "I can't blame them, they didn't do it. It's a different time now."

In recent years, Friedländer has been a part of Berlin—a part that will be missed: not artificially moralizing, but warning from her own experience. Always fashionably staged, elegant, but not offensive. She never phrased her words as demands, but as requests. The appeals of the Berlin native were moving because they seemed unexpectedly heartfelt. They exist, or rather, have existed: the voices of Holocaust survivors who have pointed their finger at the German wound and accused it. Friedländer was never that kind of person. She had a special charisma: like the dear grandmother you like to go to for comfort, yet who nevertheless warns like a mantra: "This must not happen (again)."

In 2008, she published her autobiography, "Try to Make Your Life Work." The title refers to the sentence her mother left behind when she was picked up. She read from this book at schools, and it can be found on countless bookshelves in Berlin.

Just last Wednesday, Friedländer performed in the ballroom of the Red Town Hall at the city's official commemoration of the end of World War II and liberation from National Socialism: "Please be human," was the 103-year-old's plea. Not only did Mayor Kai Wegner acknowledge her words and life's work, the entire hall responded with a standing ovation.

A day of mourning instead of a holiday

This Friday at 12 noon, Friedländer was supposed to receive the Grand Cross of Merit for her services. The appointment was canceled at short notice, and a few hours later the strong Berliner was dead. Legally, the order is considered to have been awarded - a final thank you from the Federal Republic. On Friday, the honorary citizen of Berlin passed away peacefully in the Charité, as announced by the Margot Friedländer Foundation - one day and 80 years after she was liberated from the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The fact that someone who had to endure so much suffering reached the age of 103 is an honor in itself. "Margot Friedländer gave our country reconciliation," declared Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Friday. Chancellor Friedrich Merz paid tribute to the deceased as "one of the strongest voices of our time."

She always wanted to be buried in the Weißensee Jewish Cemetery, where she placed two small stones for her mother and brother on the grave of her grandmother Adele and where there is also a memorial stone for her husband, who is buried in the USA.

The phrase "Never again," which is often a meaningless cliché these days, was given life by Friedländer. Margot Friedländer fought for this throughout her life – "without hatred," as she repeatedly emphasized. She was one of the few people you could believe.