In Memory of Margot Friedländer
One cold January morning in 1943, Margot Friedländer’s brother was arrested in the family apartment in Berlin. Her mother came home an hour later and learned what had happened from the neighbors. Without waiting for Margot, she turned herself in to the Nazi police. She left Margot a message: “Try to make your life.” In her autobiography, Margot writes that “If she’d waited for me, I would have gone with her. I couldn’t have let my mother go alone.” Two things would never leave her now: her mother’s last words to her and the guilt of wondering whether she did the right thing. She would be hidden for fifteen months by people she didn’t know. At any moment, her helpers could have been killed, but they stood by her. Margot Friedländer writes what she has now spoken hundreds of times since her return to Berlin in 2010: “They were human beings. I will never forget that.”
But in April 1944, she was “caught.” In the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Margot Bendheim met Adolf Friedländer, whom she knew from Berlin. They both survived. Then, they married and settled in the United States. Adolf died in 1997, and Margot began a new life by taking a writing course at a Jewish cultural center. She wrote her autobiography, bringing the unspeakable to words, and visited her hometown at the invitation of the Berlin Senate. Further visits to Berlin led her to decide to return to her birthplace and hometown in 2010. For the fifteen years that followed, she tirelessly gave lectures, discussions, and readings, reaching hundreds of thousands of people, as a witness to the horrors of National Socialism. In January 2022, 600 students from 30 schools participated in a single event.
With Margot Friedländer’s death on May 9 (the 220th anniversary of the death of historian and poet Friedrich Schiller), the era of oral witnesses to the Holocaust approaches its end. “Be human beings” is her much-quoted phrase and her call to posterity, to her fellow human beings. The message could not be simpler or more profound. The simpler a word, the more soul and maturity are needed to give it substance. When asked in an interview what needs to be done today, she first replied modestly that she was not a politician and was unable to answer. Then she paused and said, “Try to convince people to be human.” Again and again, she gave this simplest of words, which, from her 103 years of life and her power of forgiveness, became a gift to an entire generation. “I speak little and need few words: You must be human!” What a picture of destiny that Margot Friedländer’s memory of the primal catastrophe of the twentieth century can be summed up with one word. When her interviewer asks what we can learn from her, she repeats her credo: “To be human.” She shrugs her shoulders briefly, as she often does in interviews when searching for words to express the obvious: “I enjoy human beings.” And then, to dispel any remaining pathos, she adds with a grin: “I’m a man-eater.” When asked what makes a good life, she again replies, “To love human beings—in all their differences.”
It probably takes a long life to be able to resolve the opposition between infinite pain and infinite gratitude. Her cheerful playfulness, her large eyes, and her deeply serious face reveal how she’s transformed and transcended this contradiction. When asked if she believes in God, she replies: “I’m not religious, never have been, but I’m absolutely devout, absolutely.” In interviews, she repeatedly emphasizes how much happiness she’s experienced. When asked about people who struggle even with minor misfortunes, once again, her love for humanity responds: “Human beings are different.” Her response to the question of whether she believes the world has become a better place gives her pause for thought. She thinks for a long time, then shakes her head quietly. Her facial expressions match her simple words. When asked profound questions, her eyes begin to search the room. When she speaks, her gaze is fixed calmly on her questioner. She sees the human being.
Sources
- Veit Lindau, “Holocaust Survivor Margot Friedlander is 101 Years Old | USC Shoah Foundation” December 11, 2022;
- Obermayer Foundation, “Obermayer Awards Ceremony 2018,” YouTube, 1:32:46, January 29, 2018 [German with simultaneous translation to English];
- Full English interview, see: USC Shoah Foundation, “Holocaust Survivor Margot Friedlander is 101 Years Old,” YouTube, 4:00:06, posted by USC Shoah Foundation, December 11, 2022.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Image Margot Friedländer, taken during a reading she gave from Anne Frank’s diary, 2012: Photo: Scott-Hendryk Dillan.
