“I have come back to Germany to offer an olive branch”
#349
_sw.jpg){kind=link}
My Dear Friend,
How do we save democracy?
By having role models that we can grow from.
Like Margot Friedländer.
She was born in 1921 in Berlin, Germany. After finishing school, she apprenticed at a tailor shop. Her family tried unsuccessfully to emigrate to the United States. From 1940 onward, Margot was compelled to perform forced labor. After her parents separated, she lived with her mother and younger brother Ralph. In 1943, they made plans to escape the country, but Ralph was arrested by the Gestapo. Her mother confronted the Gestapo and was deported with her son to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. She left behind a message for her daughter, which Margot brought into hiding: "Try to make your life." The 21-year-old went underground, but was tracked down by "catchers" in 1944 and deported to Theresienstadt. She was the only member of her family to survive the camps. Together with her husband Adolph Friedländer, whom she had known from Berlin and met again in Theresienstadt, Margot moved to the US in 1946.1
In 2010, she moved back to the country that had done all this to her, Germany, at the age of 88.
She began to give frequent talks about her experiences of the Holocaust, particularly in German schools. She decided to make it her mission to tell young people about her experiences in Nazi Germany and explained,
"My brother did not have a chance. But the young people today do".
In 2023, she founded the Margot Friedländer Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust and promoting values such as tolerance, humanity, freedom, and democracy. Its mission is to continue Friedländer's legacy in a future without living eyewitnesses, ensuring that the lessons of the past remain relevant and impactful.
On Friday, May 9, eyewitness Margot Friedländer died at the age of 103.
See you in Democracy,
Johannes
I’ve taken most of that paragraph from here: Jewish Museum Berlin. (2018, April 9). Margot Friedländer: Try to Make Your Life.
May her memory be for a blessing. And may her foundation succeed in educating the generation that doesn’t remember the war, nor has parents who had grandparents who could tell the stories. These personal stories of what happened will be lost otherwise.