Margot Friedländer, the survivor of the Holocaust who found her voice, dies in 103

Margut Friedlan and Restalism, who spent more than 60 years in exile (as she saw) in New York City before returning to Germany in 2010 and finding her voice as a hero for the Holocaust memories – the work that made her famous for young Germans and She fell to her on the German Vogue cover last year He died on Friday in Berlin. It was 103.

Her death was announced in the hospital before Margot Friedlander FoundationOrganization that enhances tolerance and democracy.

“This helps me talk about what happened. You are your youth help me because you are listening. I no longer raise it anymore. I share my story to you all,” she told UNICEF members in 2023.

Mrs. Friedland and her husband, Adolf – known in America as Eddie, arrived for clear reasons – to New York in the summer of 1946. They settled in a small apartment in Queen’s gardens, Queens. He found an observer work on street 92, the cultural center on the upper eastern side of Manhattan, and became a travel agent.

The couple married the camp where they were trained; Once in America, they never talked about their joint experience. Mr. Friedländer was not to return to the country that killed their families. But when he died in 1997, Mrs. Friedlan Andder began wondering what was left behind.

She had found a community in Y, and at the request of Joe Francis Brown, who was then the director of the program there, participated in the category of note writing. It was weeks before her participation, however. The other students, all of whom were born in America, were writing about their families, children and pets. One night, unable to sleep, she started writing, and the first stories that she narrated were her first childhood memories.

Stories have become notes, “Try to make your life”: a Jewish girl hidden in Berlin Nazism “, written with Malin Chouertevger and published in Germany in 2008. (English version released in 2014.)

But she already found her mission. Thomas Halcsinski, the documentary director, heard that Mrs. Friedlan and River was working on notes, and in 2003 he persuaded her to return to Berlin and tell her story as she reconsidates the city in which she grew up. The movie Halaczinsky, “Do not call it Heimweh” – the word translates loosely as “nostalgia for the past” – next year.

I tried it to return to Berlin. I felt welcomed by the city that I once avoided. She started talking to young people in schools all over the country, which was amazed that many of them had no understanding of the Holocaust.

Mrs. Fredeller was twenty -one -year -old when Justabo came to her family. She was on her way to the house from her job in the night attack in an armament factory, and her younger brother, Ralph, was alone in their apartment. I arrived to find their front door sealed and guarded.

Mrs. Friedlan and Rander hidden the yellow star on her coat, who announced her identity, and retreated to the house of a neighbors. There, she learned that her mother brought herself to the police until she was with her 16 -year -old son, a shy and written girl. Her daughter had left her handbag with a talisman, a necklace of amber grains, a book of addresses and a brief message, presented by the neighbor: “Try to make your life.”

I walked for hours on that first night, and in the morning, she went up to a hair salon and felt her dark red hair. She spent the next 15 months in hiding, and often stops for only one or two nights, relying on scribbling headings that move from hand to hand, following the Berlin version of the underground railway.

There was a rank, anxious anxious apartment where it remained indoors for several months, with a company for the company. The couple who expected sex as rent (Mrs. Friedlan and Rand). The lacquer is affected with bugs. Gambling den. The man who gave her a cross to wear and took her to a plastic surgeon, who settled her nose for free, so that she could pass as a channel and exit in public places. The gentle couple with a black company on the black market in the food.

None of its hosts were Jews. But it is the Jews who delivered it: two men called the Jewish fishermen, and they worked in Justabo to save themselves from deportation.

After her arrest, Mrs. Friedland and Terisenstadt, a town in Bohemia that the Germans turned into it Hijina camp, roads and method. It was in June 1944. Many detainees were shipped to inform them, but about 33,000 people died in Terisencat, where the disease was rampant and the food was rare.

There, Mrs. Friedlder met Adolf Friedland, whom she knew in Berlin at a Jewish cultural center where he was the administrative director and worked as a sew in the fashion department. You did not think much at that time. He was 12 years old, specific vessels and two constitutions. I found him arrogant. But in Teresintt, they became friends and destinations, as they wandered around their lives in Berlin.

When he asked her to marry him, she said yes. The wasting days of the war, and their guards began to flee as the Russian army approached.

They were married by a rabbi in June 1945, with the mantle of prayer on their heads as air. They found the old porcelain cup to destroy, as required traditions. Mrs. Friedlander saved a piece.

A year later, they sailed to New York Port. When the statue of freedom appeared from fog, Mrs. Friedländer was contradictory. Here was a symbol of the free freedom, but, as she wrote in its memoirs, America did not welcome its family when they needed it more. She was sexual, and you will feel this way over the next six decades.

Annie Margot Bendheim was born on November 5, 1921, in Berlin. Her mother, Auguste (Gross), came from a prosperous family, but she was independent of thinking and began to make the buttons that reluctantly handed over to Margot’s father, Arthur Bende, when they got married. The marriage was unhappy, and the couple divorced when Margot was a teenager.

I loved Margot fashion, and I went to the Trade School to study drawing for fashion and advertising. Early in 1937, she began to appear in a dress salon. Nuremberg laws were in effect for two years, stripping the Jews of their rights and companies. Margut’s mother was desperate to emigrate, but her father, who had two handicapped brothers, refused. There were no stakes that restricted the number of Jewish immigrants to America and other host countries, but disability and diseases were unqualified.

After divorce, Auguste worked feverish to find a way out. Many of the desired threads evaporate, such as the papers promised by a man who took their money and disappeared.

Margot and Ralph have been recruited to work in a German army’s arms manufacturer. During this period, their father immigrated to Belgium, without hybrids for his wife and ex -children. He would have died later in Auschwitz.

It took years for Mrs. Friedländer to learn her mother and brother. Their deaths were confirmed in 1959, but it would be four decades ago before learning the details, from the deportation lists at the Liu Pike Institute in New York City, an archive of German Jewish history. They were also sent to Auschwitz. Her mother was sent to the gas room upon arrival; Her brother, after a month.

Mrs. Friedländer returned to Berlin in 2010. Since then, she has made her mission to tell her story, especially for young people. In 2023, she obtained the Federal Marawah Cross, the highest honor for the German government.

“She has always said that she was living four lives,” said the director, the director, in an interview. “Without the movie, I don’t know if she would return to Berlin. But she did, and she found a new life. She was a strong woman; she must be a tremendous effort.”

Last summer, Mrs. Friedländer appeared on the German Vogue cover, delighted in a bright red coat. There was only one cover line: the word “love” – ​​the subject of the case – presented in Mrs. Fricländer, with her signing below.

The magazine told that it was “horrific” in the rise of anti -Semitism and extreme right -wing nationalism. But she warned, “Do not look at what separates us. Look towards what brings us together. Be a people. Be reasonable.”