Margot Friedländer — a survivor and witness to the Nazi Holocaust and a prominent voice in modern-day Germany — passed away on Friday at the age of 103.
Friedländer spent part of the war years hiding in Berlin before she was taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944.
She emigrated to the United States shortly after the end of the war, only moving back to the German capital in 2010, at the age of 88.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed his condolences, saying that Friedländer “gifted our country reconciliation.”
Steinmeier was due to honor Friedländer with a state medal.
Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz praised Friedländer for speaking up for “peacefull cooperation, against antisemitism, and forgetting.”
“She entrusted us with her story. It is our task and our duty to pass it on,” Merz said.
Friedländer spent 15 months in hiding in Berlin, being protected by non-Jewish Germans. She didn’t learn of her family’s deaths in Auschwitz until much later. In the spring of 1944, she encountered a patrol of so-called “graspers” — Jews who were forced to track down and extradite other Jews on behalf of the Nazi SS. This led to her own imprisonment in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she managed to survive until the fall of the Nazi regime in May 1945. After the liberation, she married a man who was also in the camp, and the two left for the US in 1946.
