Margot Friedländer, holocaust survivor, turns 100 years old

Margot Friedländer says that he has lived four different lives in his 100 years, but the moment he marked her forever was when the first one became the second.It was when she, after her first years in her in Berlin, she hid for 15 months of the Nazi authorities and then survived a year in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

The scene, reported in her memoirs published in 2008, occurred on January 20, 1943 in the apartment of a couple she barely knew in the Kreuzberg district, where she knew that her mother had just been.She was 21 years old and responded to the name of Margon Bendheim.She told her that her mother had gone to meet Ralph, her other son.Margot's brother had been arrested that afternoon by the Gestapo.

He was given his mother's bag, which contained a address notebook and an amber necklace, and transmitted his last message: "Try to make your life.""These words shape my life," explains Friedländer to DW during an exhibition of his portraits, one of the tributes organized this week in Berlin for the 100 years of him, which were fulfilled this Friday (05.11.2021)."I feel that I have achieved something, not only for my mother, not only for six million Jews, but for the many millions of people who were killed because they did not want to do what they told them," he said.

"Try to make your life"

Although Friedländer did not find out to decades later, his mother and his brother were killed in Auschwitz a few weeks after his arrest.His father, who had fled to Belgium years before, had already been previously killed.Sixty -five years later, the final message of his mother became the title of Friedländer's memoirs, a book that initiated the work of memory and education that has occupied his last decade in Berlin, where he finally returned in 2010.

It was not easy.Many people tried to dissuade her.Other survivors of the holocaust that she knew in New York, including her cousin Jean of her, opposed.Her own husband, Adolf Friedländer, another holocaust survivor whom she had met in Theresienstadt and died in 1997, had always vehemently rejected the occasional invitations that had reached her throughout the years of the Berlin government.

"I often wonder if returning here was the right thing," recalls Friedländer in A Long Way Home, a 2010 documentary co -produced by DW.In the same film, she Margot admitted to having uncomfortable feelings against some Berliners."I am still very suspicious with the people of my generation that I know here. They were the ones who cheered the Nazis at that time. And they did nothing to stop what was happening. Everyone knew and looked the other way.I returned, it's still something that affects me deeply, "he laments.

For the next generations

But all those doubts were diluted with the work that he has undertook since then.He dedicated himself to lectures, at 87 years of age, especially in schools."They listen to me carefully," he says now about students."I have received - I don't know - 1000 letters. I tell you: what happened cannot be changed, but this is for you," she explains."That became my mission."

Friedländer's return to Berlin was collected in a documentary trilogy made by Thomas Halaczinsky, German filmmaker resident in New York.The first one, Don's Call It Heimweh (do not call him nostalgia for the home), on the occasion of his first visit to Berlin in 2003. "I saw how the effects of German history, fascism, oppression, of theHolocaust, they really continue in the lives of people like Margot, who struggle to accept their lives and their own identity, "the director tells DW.

Friedländer had spent 15 months hidden in Berlin, protected by non -Jewish Germans, while at the same time other Germans murdered his family."How does anyone really find balance?"Halaczinsky asks.In the second film, A Long Way Home (a long way home), she herself asks the question: "How can I feel nostalgia for Germany after the Germans killed my parents?"And she answers: "That's precisely why I came here, to meet the young people who had nothing to do with that."

A service for Germany

That internal conflict seems to be very far 18 years after that first visit.Since then, Friedländer has received a multitude of honorary decorations and citizenships.He has starred in exhibitions, books, movies and even a graphic novel, portraits have been painted and Bustos molten.The Schwarzkopf Foundation, created to encourage young people to get involved in politics, founded an annual prize in his honor in 2014, often delivered by Angela Merkel.

To the praise is added the probable next mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey, who was also at the opening of the exhibition on Tuesday."I think she is a model for all of us," she said to DW."She shares her experience with children, young people and people of all ages", something "very important for our political education today," she says."Listening to this voice, in her centenary, is very important for all who defend a free and open society," she concludes.

Friedländer "tends a hand of reconciliation," explains the president of the Schwarzkopf Foundation, André Schmitz."It makes it easy for the Germans: it is lovely, cheerful, enjoy that they listen to it, it does not accuse us, but it says 'be careful, this was possible and is still possible.' It is an incalculable service."

Soon they will not be survivors to tell it

The last of Halaczinsky's films, which covers in recent years of his work, has been recently broadcast by the German public chain.It is titled Angekommen (arrival), and his last scene shows Friedländer in a contemplative and unusually uncertain mood."I don't make my hope that some of this is when he died," he says."My contribution is after all very very small. Maybe the generation that now hears me in schools transmits something to their children. I have no idea how long, because many people keep saying that we no longer want to talk about that anymore," he says.

As pessimistic that seems, for Halaczinsky this end is a call to action.Soon there will be no survivors of the Holocaust to tell first hand the true horrors of fascism."Although his work is being recognized, this is not a work that can be completed. It is a process, he continues," says Halaczinsky, "his doubts are a warning for all of us."

(LGC/RR)