{"id":88764,"date":"2025-05-10T00:54:16","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T00:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/88764\/"},"modified":"2025-05-10T00:54:16","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T00:54:16","slug":"german-holocaust-survivor-margot-friedlander-dies-at-age-103-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/88764\/","title":{"rendered":"German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedl\u00e4nder dies at age 103"},"content":{"rendered":"

BERLIN — Margot Friedl\u00e4nder, a German Jew who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp<\/a> and became a high-profile witness to Nazi persecution in her final years, has died. She was 103.<\/p>\n

Her death was announced by the Margot Friedl\u00e4nder Foundation in Berlin, German news agency dpa reported Friday evening. <\/p>\n

Details about when and where she died, as well as the cause of death, were not immediately available. The foundation did not immediately respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment.<\/p>\n

She died the week of the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany\u2019s unconditional surrender<\/a> in World War II.<\/p>\n

After spending much of her life in the United States, Friedl\u00e4nder returned to live in the German capital in her 80s. She was honored with Germany\u2019s highest decoration and with a statue at Berlin\u2019s City Hall.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I do gives me my strength and probably also my energy, because I speak for those who can no longer speak,\u201d Friedl\u00e4nder said at an event at Berlin\u2019s Jewish Museum in 2018.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to say that I don\u2019t just speak for the 6 million Jews who were killed<\/a>, but for all the people who were killed \u2014 innocent people,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed his condolences in a statement, saying she gave Germany reconciliation despite the horrors she went through here in her life. Steinmeier said the country cannot be grateful enough for her gift.<\/p>\n

A report released last month said more than 200,000 Jewish survivors<\/a> are still alive but 70% of them will be gone<\/a> within the next 10 years.<\/p>\n

Friedl\u00e4nder was born Margot Bendheim on Nov. 5, 1921. Her father, Artur Bendheim, owned a shop in Berlin. He had fought for Germany and had been decorated in World War I.<\/p>\n

Friedl\u00e4nder recalled that, after the Nazis took power, her father initially said that \u201cthey don\u2019t mean us; We\u2019re Germans.\u201d She added that \u201cwe didn\u2019t see it until it was too late.” <\/p>\n

Friedl\u00e4nder wanted to design clothes and started an apprenticeship as a tailor. After her parents divorced in 1937, Friedl\u00e4nder, her mother and younger brother went to live with her grandparents. In 1941, they had to move to a so-called \u201cJewish apartment,\u201d and Friedl\u00e4nder was forced to work nights at a metal factory. <\/p>\n

In January 1943, just as the family was planning to flee Berlin, Friedl\u00e4nder returned home to discover that her brother, Ralph, had been taken away by the Gestapo. A neighbor told her that her mother had decided to go to the police and \u201cgo with Ralph, wherever that may be.\u201d<\/p>\n

She passed on her mother\u2019s final message \u2014 \u201cTry to make your life,\u201d which would later become the title of Friedl\u00e4nder’s autobiography \u2014 along with her handbag.<\/p>\n

Friedl\u00e4nder went into hiding, taking off the yellow star that Jews were obliged to wear. She recalled getting her hair dyed red, reasoning that \u201cpeople think Jews don\u2019t have red hair.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said that 16 people helped keep her under the radar over the next 15 months.<\/p>\n

That ended in April 1944 when she was taken in by police after being stopped for an identity check after leaving a bunker following an air raid. She said she quickly decided to tell the truth and say that she was Jewish. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe running and hiding was over,\u201d she said. \u201cI felt separated from the fate of my people. I had felt guilty every day; had I gone with my mother and my brother, I would at least have known what had happened to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friedl\u00e4nder arrived in June 1944 at the packed Theresienstadt camp. In the spring of 1945, she recalled later, she saw the arrival of skeletal prisoners who had been forced onto death marches from Auschwitz ahead of that camp\u2019s liberation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt that moment, we heard of the death camps, and at that moment I understood that I would not see my mother and my brother again,\u201d she said. Both were killed at the Auschwitz death camp.<\/p>\n

Her father had fled in 1939 to Belgium. He later went to France, where he was interned, before being deported in 1942 to Auschwitz, where he was also killed.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the camp\u2019s liberation, she married Adolf Friedl\u00e4nder, an acquaintance from Berlin whom she met again at Theresienstadt. He had a sister in America, and \u2014 after months in a camp for displaced persons \u2014 they arrived in New York in 1946.<\/p>\n

Friedl\u00e4nder stayed away from Germany for 57 years. She and her husband became U.S. citizens; she worked as a tailor and later ran a travel agency.<\/p>\n

Adolf Friedl\u00e4nder died in 1997, aged 87. Margot returned to Germany for the first time in 2003, when she was received at Berlin\u2019s City Hall along with others who had been pushed out by the Nazis.<\/p>\n

In 2010, she moved back to the German capital, where she told her story to students and was decorated with, among other things, the country\u2019s highest honor, the Order of Merit. She was made a citizen of honor of Berlin in 2018.<\/p>\n

Noting that there were few Holocaust survivors still alive, she told an audience that year: \u201cI would like you to be the witnesses we can\u2019t be for much longer.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BERLIN — Margot Friedl\u00e4nder, a German Jew who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and became a high-profile witness…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[42243,3907,2000,299,4179,1824,14618,8547,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-88764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-42243","9":"tag-article","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-general-news","13":"tag-germany","14":"tag-prisons","15":"tag-religion","16":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114480812114913425","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}