{"id":66316,"date":"2025-06-04T22:42:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T20:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=66316"},"modified":"2025-06-06T18:29:55","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T16:29:55","slug":"be-human-beings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/be-human-beings\/","title":{"rendered":"Be Human Beings!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Memory of Margot Friedl\u00e4nder<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One cold January morning in 1943, Margot Friedl\u00e4nder\u2019s 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: \u201cTry to make your life.\u201d In her autobiography, Margot writes that \u201cIf she\u2019d waited for me, I would have gone with her. I couldn\u2019t have let my mother go alone.\u201d Two things would never leave her now: her mother\u2019s 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\u2019t know. At any moment, her helpers could have been killed, but they stood by her. Margot Friedl\u00e4nder writes what she has now spoken hundreds of times since her return to Berlin in 2010: \u201cThey were human beings. I will never forget that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in April 1944, she was \u201ccaught.\u201d In the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Margot Bendheim met Adolf Friedl\u00e4nder, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Margot Friedl\u00e4nder\u2019s 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. \u201cBe human beings\u201d 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, \u201cTry to convince people to be human.\u201d 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. \u201cI speak little and need few words: You must be human!\u201d What a picture of destiny that Margot Friedl\u00e4nder\u2019s 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: \u201cTo be human.\u201d She shrugs her shoulders briefly, as she often does in interviews when searching for words to express the obvious: \u201cI enjoy human beings.\u201d And then, to dispel any remaining pathos, she adds with a grin: \u201cI\u2019m a man-eater.\u201d When asked what makes a good life, she again replies, \u201cTo love human beings\u2014in all their differences.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s transformed and transcended this contradiction. When asked if she believes in God, she replies: \u201cI\u2019m not religious, never have been, but I\u2019m absolutely devout, absolutely.\u201d In interviews, she repeatedly emphasizes how much happiness she\u2019s experienced. When asked about people who struggle even with minor misfortunes, once again, her love for humanity responds: \u201cHuman beings are different.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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