Diminutive and disarming, Margot Friedländer was the Holocaust survivor modern Germany needed.
When she was laid to rest on Thursday in Berlin, 103 years after she was born here as Anni Margot Bendheim, the mourners included all of Germany’s highest representatives. Public television covered the funeral, marking the end of not one, but four distinct lives.
The last life began in 2010 when, as a sprightly 88 year-old widow, Friedländer left New York after six decades and returned to her birth city. After decades of silence, Friedländer began visiting schools to tell goggle-eyed German children about her family – her estranged parents and their button factory, her gifted brother Ralph who loved books and the violin. And the day when her life fell apart.
After several failed attempts to escape the growing Nazi persecution, the net finally closed on January 20th, 1943. When the Gestapo secret police collected 17-year-old Ralph, a neighbour told Margot her mother had gone to the local police station to follow her son “wherever that might be”.
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Arriving later, a neighbour gave Margot her mother’s amber necklace, which she wore until the end of her life, and a message: “Make something of your life.” The lives of her parents and brother, she found out later, ended in Auschwitz.
Margot went into hiding, living with 16 families over 15 months with a false identity, raven hair and a new nose. Eventually she was denounced and sent to Theresienstadt camp. There she met Adolf Friedländer, an acquaintance from Berlin. They survived hunger and disease and were married in the camp in June 1945, six weeks after its liberation.
A year later the couple were on a boat to New York but Margot never warmed to her adoptive home. After a first visit back to Berlin in 2003 she moved back permanently seven years later.
She was a bundle of energy, visiting schools several times a week to tell her story and deliver a simple, elegant message.
“There is no Christian, Jewish or Muslim blood, just human blood,” she said. “People killed millions of people because they didn’t see their victims as people. It is your task to make sure, in future, that nothing ever happens like what we experienced. My message is simple: be human.”
Even before her death, and the last week of moving tributes, it’s not clear that everyone in Germany understood the meaning of Friedländer’s return. Why, they asked repeatedly and disbelievingly, had she moved back to the “land of the perpetrators”?
“I don’t see it that way, I love Germany, it is my home, I was born here and I have the right to be here,” she said in a 2021 interview. “I don’t have to excuse or explain myself that the circle of my life should close again in Berlin.”
Friedländer was here because she wanted to be and was entitled to be, after Germany returned the citizenship stolen by the Nazis.
Not everyone understood that but they liked having her around anyway. In her final years, Friedländer became something of a celebrity. She made the cover of German Vogue and was a regular guest at Berlin parties and premieres where, Friedländer joked, she was making up for her lost party years as a young woman.
A photographer friend who worked many such events noticed how often guests were anxious to get their selfie with Margot, then left her sitting alone in a corner. Friedländer didn’t seem to mind, happy to use any platform available to spread her simple, profound message: be human.
As one of the last survivors of the Holocaust, Friedländer was surprised at the implied forgiveness sought of her. Those who persecuted her, she told their grandchildren, were dead. And even if they were alive, such forgiveness could never come because, at least in the Jewish tradition, those who could forgive them were murdered.
Instead Friedländer asked her questioners questions, wondering aloud why so many people supported dehumanising Nazi era policies, ducked out of sight or remained silent. “Why? That is the great question that no one can answer for me and which torments me.”
New questions tormented Friedländer in her final years: why one in four support a party that views the Nazi era and its staggering crimes as “birdshit” in the otherwise glorious sweep of German history. Why anti-Semitic resentment and anti-democratic agitation are once more on the rise in Germany.
Margot Friedländer did not return to Berlin to forgive the Germans or make them feel better about themselves and a past that cannot be changed. Instead she asked them to honour the memory of that time alive by learning its lessons: be human, reject hate, dehumanisation and exclusion now and in the future. In the polarised atmosphere of Germany’s post-October 7th moral maze, the outcome is open.
