When Margot Friedlander celebrates her 100th birthday with 100 friends on Friday, Germany’s best-known Holocaust survivor will be raising a glass to her four very different lives.
Her first life was her childhood in Berlin, in the growing shadow of fascism; her second life saw her family deported to Auschwitz and murdered; her third life, after surviving the Theresienstadt concentration camp, saw her start over in New York with her husband, another survivor; and her fourth life came 11 years ago when, as a widow, she moved back home.
Now a public figure, until pandemic restrictions she spoke twice a week to schoolchildren about the Shoah. The title of her autobiography, now in its 11th reprint, is her mother’s last words to her: Try to live your life.
“For 100 I’m feeling rather good, not like 100 at all,” she told Die Zeit weekly. “I don’t want to know what people’s parents or grandparents did, I concentrate on telling them: stay careful, watch that something like that never happens again. Not for me, but for yourselves.”
Leading the congratulations, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier called her a “tireless fighter against hate, exclusion and far-right extremism”. He said Friedlander’s “engagement for reconciliation is a legacy to us all . . . that we teach the next generation tolerance”.
Eight years older than Anne Frank, Friedlander says she survived the Nazis by chance. Her childhood ended when, aged 17, she witnessed the 1938 Nazi-organised Pogrom against synagogues and Jewish shops. Her mother was anxious to emigrate, her father – a war veteran – refused to leave.
When her parents divorced, Margot and her brother Ralph stayed with their mother. In January 1943, on the day they planned to go into hiding, her mother and brother were rounded up by the Nazis and deported to their death in Auschwitz. Later she found out that her estranged father had also been murdered in the notorious death camp.
False identity
Alone in Berlin, Margot removed her yellow Jewish star from her coat, dyed her hair red and lived discreetly under a false identity until she was caught in 1944 and sent to the Theresienstadt camp. At the end of the war, just before the camp was liberated, she met her future husband, Adolf Friedlander, an acquaintance from Berlin’s main Jewish cultural organisation.
They married and emigrated to New York, dropping the ä from their surname. She worked as a seamstress and later ran a travel agency. The couple travelled back regularly to Europe, but her husband refused to set foot in Germany.
“I had a different feeling to Germany than my mother, I experienced Germans who helped me in the difficult time, who didn’t look away,” says Friedlander now. “They were only a few but I’ve never forgotten them.”
A decade into her fourth life she has remained outspoken and blunt, like a true Berliner. When she secured German citizenship, stripped from all Jews by the Nazis, she told the then president Horst Köhler: “No doubt you expect me to say thank you, but I won’t do that. You are only giving me back what you took.”
Germany’s best-known centenarian says a shadow hangs over Friday’s celebration: the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) that, in September’s federal election, took a quarter of the vote in eastern regions.
“I am not politically educated but what is happening today touches me in an unpleasant way,” she told Die Zeit. “I love people and I think that there is good in everyone. But in everyone there is also something bad.”
