Margot Friedländer

“Where is she?” I ask, out of breath. The woman waits until I’m inside. Then she shuts the door. “She left.” At first, I don’t understand. Did I get here too late? Is she out looking for me? “She left a message for you.” I am waiting for the woman to hand me something, but she just stands there. I look for a slip of paper in her hand, something my mother would have written down for me. “I’m supposed to give you a message.” Then she tells me what my mother can no longer tell me herself: “I have decided to go to the police. I am going with Ralph, wherever that may be. Try to make your life.”

‘Try to Make Your Life’, Margot Friedlander with Malin Schwerdtfeger (2014)

Margot’s mother had turned herself in to the Gestapo – just hours after Ralph, Margot’s seventeen-year-old brother, had been arrested. They were both deported a few days later and died in Auschwitz.

Life before the war

Margot grew up in Berlin with her younger brother and their parents. Her father, Arthur, ran a wholesale company that sold button-making machines and accessories for clothing to tailoring shops and garment businesses in the capital’s thriving textile industry and abroad. Her mother Auguste, an entrepreneur in the button trade, had founded the business herself before stepping back to become a housewife after her marriage. Margot was born in 1921, a year after their wedding.

She and her brother Ralph – whom Margot described as a ‘math whiz’ who ‘played the violin at seven’ – grew up in a loving family, with frequent holiday trips to visit relatives in Germany and Czechoslovakia. Her parents were passionate about the Arts, and held season tickets to the opera. Margot dreamed of becoming a seamstress and designer. In 1936, she enrolled in the Jewish arts college ‘Feige und Strassburger’ to study fashion and soon began an apprenticeship in a small salon.

One morning in November 1938, Margot stepped outside to catch the streetcar to work and immediately felt an eerie stillness in the air. As she passed the shops, she saw shattered shop windows and smelled smoke - the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. The salon where she was employed had been taken over, and she was banned from working there. Her father, who had recently separated from her mother, went into hiding, and they had no idea of his whereabouts. He soon reappeared. He had been forced to give up his company: it had been ‘aryanised’. As part of the transfer of his company, he was to travel abroad with the new owner to introduce him to foreign customers – his chance to escape. Before he left, he secured a position for Margot in the Kulturbund, an association founded in 1933 in which Jews expelled from Germany’s public cultural institutions worked to stage plays, lectures, concerts and operas.

Her father fled to Belgium, leaving them behind. As antisemitism escalated, and the war began, her mother, attempting to escape Germany with the children, sought asylum in the United States, Brazil and China, but all their applications were denied. Soon, Margot and her brother were assigned to forced labour to support the war effort. The family shrank further as grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins either fled or were deported: ‘There was hardly anybody left, everybody had disappeared in various directions. We did not hear from anybody anymore, we did not know what happened to them’.

Just as Margot, her mother and her brother were preparing to escape to Bielitz, Ralph was taken by the Gestapo in January 1943.

Disappearing in Berlin

‘Try to make your life’. It wasn’t until much later when, in the midst of educating students, and writing and speaking publicly on the Holocaust, that Margot finally felt that she had fulfilled her mother’s wish.

Since all of her friends were Jewish, and in hiding, Margot didn’t know where to seek refuge. She approached a non-Jewish Swiss aunt for shelter, but her aunt rejected her, suggesting that Margot should have accompanied her mother to the Gestapo.

Alone and scared, Margot also went into hiding. In an effort to look ‘less Jewish’, she dyed her hair a reddish shade, wore a cross pendant, and had underground surgery performed on her nose.

Over the next fifteen months, sixteen people risked their lives to help her, giving her places to stay and food to eat. She was never to ask the names of those who hid her, nor where they lived, in case she was caught and exposed the network. She would memorise an address, destroy the paper and go to the address.

She was eventually caught by Jewish spies, the so-called Greifer (‘snatchers’) in April 1944 when leaving a bomb shelter with two of her helpers. When she couldn’t show her documents, she admitted she was Jewish. She was taken to the gathering point set up at the Jewish Hospital in Iranische Strasse, where she stayed a few weeks before being deported to Theresienstadt ghetto-labour camp.

Life in Theresienstadt

When she arrived in Theresienstadt in June 1944, the camp was overcrowded, with thousands of people being moved in and out at a rapid pace, staying for only a few months before being deported to death camps. The sanitary conditions were horrific, with cramped barracks infested with lice and fleas, little to no food, and diseases rapidly spreading.

A man she knew from the Kulturbund and who worked in the Jewish administration of the camp managed to get her a position sewing clothes for the commandant, the SS and their families. He then secured her a shift at a mica factory, a job which offered some protection. Margot survived a winter that saw many others die from the cold and malnutrition.

At the beginning of February 1945, trains carrying prisoners from Auschwitz arrived in Theresienstadt – Margot did not see any of them at first, but heard about them from the labour squads who helped unload the living and the dead, and from the nurses who cared for them.

At that same time, prisoners who had been sent to Wulkow to build barracks, bunkers and air raid shelters for the Reich Security Main Office also returned to Theresienstadt. The project was abandoned as the Belorussian front had already advanced too far. One of those prisoners was Adolf Friedländer, a man Margot knew (though not well) from the Kulturbund: ‘I did not recognise him at first – his arm was in a sling, his head and neck were bandaged. But when he approached, he immediately greeted me by name: Margot ... We were so happy to meet someone from before.’ As they both stayed at the same barracks, they could see each other often. The mica factory had been closed down and Adolf had not yet been assigned work while recovering from furunculosis, so they spent many hours talking.

At the end of April 1945, Margot and others were called to help with an expected transport – their first encounter with the death camps. A long train of cattle wagons arrived. As the doors were pushed open, people who barely looked human fell out or were pushed out of the overcrowded wagons. One could hardly tell the living from the dead. Something fell into Margot’s arms: a human being so weak that she had to carry him. He was as light as a feather.

Margot heard the name Auschwitz for the first time, everyone had only ever talked about transports to the East. The prisoners had been sent on a death march shortly before the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January. The SS did everything they could to prevent the survivors from falling into the hands of the Russians and to prevent the Allies from finding out about the true extent of the extermination in the concentration camps. The majority of those prisoners had long died - shot, starved, or deceased from exhaustion, cold or typhus. At some point, the remaining survivors had been picked up, forced into cattle wagons and sent to Theresienstadt, one of the last camps that had not yet been liberated.

At that moment, Margot realised that she would never see her mother and brother again.

When the camp was finally liberated in May 1945, Adolf proposed to Margot. They were married by a rabbi in Theresienstadt one month later. At the end of June 1945, Adolf received a telegram from his sister Ilse, who was living in New York. From then on, it was clear to him that they would emigrate to the US. Margot wasn’t quite so sure, but knew that she would go with Adolf wherever he went.

In July 1945, they were taken to the displaced persons camp in Deggendorf, where, in Margot’s words, they were ‘turned back into a human being again’. Margot and Adolf worked in the administration of the camp. On the train journey to Bremerhaven in July 1946, they travelled through destroyed villages and cities and over provisionally rebuilt bridges; there was still little sign of reconstruction. Margot and Adolf finally boarded a ship that took them to the United States. On 28 July 1946, they arrived in New York.

Life after the war

When you are young, you want to live. When you survived, you suffer.

Margot and Adolf lived in New York for 51 years, Margot working as a travel agent and a seamstress and Adolf as an administration manager, never returning to Germany.

After her husband passed in December 1997, she enrolled in a writing class. The result was an autobiography titled after her mother’s words ‘Try to make your life’. She began circuiting schools, educating students on what had happened to her.

I wrote every night ... I had all these stories in my head. Everything started coming back to me, many things that I pushed aside for years.

Margot was invited back to Berlin by the Berlin Senate in 2003. The filmmaker Thomas Halaczinsky accompanied her and shot the film Don’t call it homesickness with her in the places of her youth. The trip was revelatory for her: she felt like she was home again and in 2009, aged 88, she returned for good. Her German citizenship was restored in 2010 and she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 2011.

In 2016, she received the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin. Margot was made an honorary citizen of Berlin in 2018, and told the ceremony’s audience: ‘Hitler, Göring and Goebbels were also honorary citizens. They would turn in their graves now, if they had graves.’

Further honours and prizes followed, including the Federal Cross of Merit First Class in 2023 and the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit in 2025.

At 101 years old, she established the Margot Friedländer Foundation to campaign for freedom, tolerance and democracy, so that what was done to millions of people in her generation would never happen again.

Margot passed away on 9 May 2025, aged 103.

Margot’s message to Europe:

What happened, happened: we can no longer change it. It must never, never happen again. I speak not only on behalf of the 6 million Jews who were murdered but for all innocents who were murdered by the National Socialist regime. It is for you, for your children, for your descendants. It is my mission. I will say it again: be human!

Speech at the European Parliament, 27 January 2022