Margot Friedlander, Holocaust survivor who found her voice, dies at 103

Margot Friedländer, a Holocaust survivor who spent more than 60 years in exile (as she saw it) in New York City before returning to Germany in 2010 and finding her voice as a champion of Holocaust remembrance -- work that made her a celebrity to young Germans and landed her on the cover of German Vogue last year -- died on Friday in Berlin. She was 103.

Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Margot Friedländer Foundation, an organization promoting tolerance and democracy.

"It helps me to talk about what happened," she told the members of a UNICEF Club in 2023. "You young people help me because you listen. I don't bottle it up anymore. I share my story for all of you."

Friedländer and her husband, Adolf -- known in America as Eddie, for obvious reasons -- arrived in New York in the summer of 1946. They settled into a small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. He found work as comptroller of the 92nd Street Y, the cultural center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and she became a travel agent.

The couple had married at the camp where they were both interned; once in America, they never spoke of their shared experience. Friedländer was adamant about never returning to the country that had murdered their families. But when he died in 1997, Friedländer began to wonder what had been left behind.

She had found a community at the Y, and, at the urging of Jo Frances Brown, who was then the program director there, she signed up for a memoir-writing class. It was weeks before she participated, however. The other students, all American-born, were writing about their families, their children, their pets. One night, unable to sleep, she began to write, and the first stories she told were her earliest childhood memories.

The stories became a memoir, "'Try to Make Your Life': A Jewish Girl Hiding in Nazi Berlin," written with Malin Schwerdtfeger and published in Germany in 2008. (An English-language edition came out in 2014.)

But she had already found her mission. Thomas Halaczinsky, a documentary filmmaker, had heard that Friedländer was working on a memoir, and in 2003 he persuaded her to return to Berlin and tell her story as she revisited the city where she had grown up. Halaczinsky's film, "Don't Call It Heimweh" -- the word translates loosely as "nostalgia" -- came out the next year.

The experience of returning to Berlin galvanized her. She felt welcomed by the city that had once shunned her. She began speaking to young people in schools around the country, startled that so many had no understanding of the Holocaust.

Friedländer was 21 when the Gestapo came for her family. She was on her way home from her job on the night shift in an armaments factory, and her younger brother, Ralph, had been alone in their apartment. She arrived to find their front door sealed and guarded.

Hiding the yellow star on her coat that proclaimed her identity as a Jew, Friedländer slipped away to a neighbor's house. There, she learned that her mother had turned herself in to the police so she could be with her 16-year-old son, a shy and bookish child. She had left her daughter her handbag with a talisman, a necklace of amber beads, an address book and a brief message, delivered by the neighbor: "Try to make your life."

She walked for hours that first night, and in the morning she ducked into a hair salon and had her dark hair dyed Titian red. She spent the next 15 months in hiding, often stopping for just a night or two, relying on scribbled addresses passed from hand to hand, following the Berlin version of the Underground Railroad.

There was the rank, filth-encrusted apartment where she stayed inside for months, with a dog for company. The couple that expected sex as rent (Friedländer declined). The billet infested with bedbugs. The gambling den. The man who gave her a cross to wear and took her to a plastic surgeon who straightened her nose for free, so she could pass as a gentile and venture out in public. The kindly couple with a thriving black-market business in food.

None of her hosts were Jewish. But it was Jews who turned her in: two men who were so-called Jewish catchers, working for the Gestapo to save themselves from deportation.

After her capture, Friedländer was sent to Theresienstadt, a town in Bohemia that the Germans had converted to a hybrid ghetto-camp and way station. It was June 1944. Many detainees were shipped away to be exterminated, but some 33,000 people died at Theresienstadt, where disease was rampant and food was scarce.

There, Friedländer met up with Adolf Friedländer, whom she had known in Berlin at a Jewish cultural center where he was the administrative director and she worked as a seamstress in the costume department.

She hadn't thought much of him at the time. He was 12 years older, bespectacled and taciturn. She found him arrogant. But at Theresienstadt, they became friends and confidants, poring over their vanished life in Berlin.

When he asked her to marry him, she said yes. It was the waning days of the war, and their guards had begun to flee as the Russian army approached.

They were married by a rabbi in June 1945, with a prayer mantle held over their heads as a huppah. They found an old porcelain cup to smash, as tradition required. Friedländer saved a piece.

A year later, they sailed into New York Harbor. When the Statue of Liberty emerged from the fog, Friedländer was ambivalent. Here was the vaunted symbol of liberty, but, as she wrote in her memoir, America had not welcomed her family when they needed it most. She was stateless, and she would feel that way for the next six decades.

Anni Margot Bendheim was born on Nov. 5, 1921, in Berlin. Her mother, Auguste (Gross) Bendheim, came from a prosperous family but was independent-minded and had started her own button-making business that she turned over, reluctantly, to Margot's father, Arthur Bendheim, when they married. The marriage was unhappy, and the couple divorced when Margot was a teenager.

Margot loved fashion, and she went to trade school to study drawing for fashion and advertising. Early in 1937, she began apprenticing at a dress salon. The Nuremberg Laws had been in effect for two years, stripping Jews of their rights and businesses. Margot's mother was desperate to emigrate, but her father, who had two disabled siblings, refused. Not only were there quotas restricting the number of Jewish émigrés to America and other host countries, but disability and illness were disqualifiers.

After the divorce, Auguste worked desperately to find a way out. Many hoped-for leads evaporated, like the papers promised by a man who took their money and vanished.

Margot and Ralph were conscripted to work in a factory that made armaments for the German military. During this period, their father emigrated to Belgium, heedless of the circumstances of his former wife and children. He would later die at Auschwitz.

It took years for Friedländer to learn her mother and brother's fate. Their deaths were confirmed in 1959, but it would be another four decades before she learned the details, from the deportation lists at 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 upon arrival; her brother, a month later.

Friedländer moved back to Berlin in 2010. Since then, she had made it her mission to tell her story, especially to young people. In 2023, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, the German government's highest honor.

"She always said she had four lives," Halaczinsky, the filmmaker, said in an interview. "Without the film, I don't know if she would have gone back to Berlin. But she did, and she found a new life. She was a powerful woman; it must have been a tremendous effort."

Last summer, Friedländer appeared on the cover of German Vogue, beaming in a bright red coat. There was only one cover line: the word "love" -- the theme of the issue -- rendered in Friedländer's shaky cursive, with her signature below it.

She told the magazine she was "appalled" at the rise of antisemitism and far-right nationalism. But she cautioned: "Look not toward what separates us. Look toward what brings us together. Be people. Be sensible."