Germany lays to rest Margot Friedlaender, Holocaust survivor key to remembrance culture

BERLIN (Reuters) - Margot Friedlaender, a Holocaust survivor who played an important role in Germany's remembrance culture ensuring the country's Nazi past is not played down with the passage of time, was laid to rest on Thursday after dying last week aged 103.

A funeral ceremony took place at a Jewish cemetery and Holocaust memorial site in Weissensee, Berlin, the city where Friedlaender was born and to which she eventually returned.

Among the mourners were President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who bowed to her coffin which was covered in pink and white flowers.

Friedlaender died on May 9, almost exactly 80 years after the Soviet Red Army liberated the Theresienstadt concentration camp where she was imprisoned.

For Steinmeier, she embodied the "miracle of reconciliation" between Germany and Jews around the world, while Merz called her "one of the strongest voices of our time: for peaceful coexistence, against anti-Semitism and forgetting".

Friedlaender was born in Berlin in 1921 to Auguste and Arthur Bendheim, a businessman. Her parents split in 1937 and Auguste tried in vain to emigrate with Margot and her younger brother, Ralph, in the face of intensifying persecution of Jews.

Her father was deported in August 1942 to the Auschwitz death camp where he was murdered. In early 1943, on the day Margot, Ralph and Auguste were set to make a final attempt to leave Germany, Ralph was arrested by the Gestapo secret police.

Auguste was not with her son at the time but turned herself in to accompany him in deportation to Auschwitz where both later died. Margot went underground and managed to elude the Gestapo by dying her hair red and having her nose operated on.

But she was finally apprehended in April 1944 by Jewish "catchers" - Jews recruited to track down others in hiding in exchange for security - and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is the Czech Republic today.

She survived Theresienstadt and met her future husband, Adolf Friedlaender, there in early 1945, shortly before the liberation of all Nazi camps at the end of World War Two, and they emigrated to New York in 1946.

In New York, Margot worked as a dressmaker and travel agent, while her husband held senior posts in Jewish organisations. Both vowed never to return to Germany.

After her husband's death Margot revisited Berlin in 2003, among a number of Holocaust survivors invited back by the German capital's governing Senate. She moved back for good in 2010, at age 88, regaining her German citizenship and giving talks about her Holocaust experiences, particularly in German schools.

"Not only did she extend a hand to us Germans – she came back; she gave us the gift of her tremendously generous heart and her unfailing humanity," Steinmeier said this week.

Friedlaender's autobiography, "Try To Make Your Life - a Jewish Girl Hiding in Nazi Berlin" was published in 2008, titled after the final message that her mother managed to pass on to Margot.

She was awarded Germany's Federal Cross of Merit in 2011 and in 2014, the Margot Friedlaender Prize was created to support students in Holocaust remembrance and encourage young people to show moral courage.

In a 2021 interview with Die Zeit magazine marking her centenary, Friedlaender reflected on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party's rise since 2015 on the back of anti-immigrant sentiment, saying it made her uncomfortable.

"I remember how excited the 10-year-old boys were back then (in Nazi era) when they were allowed to march. When you saw how people absorbed that - you don't forget that," she said.

"I always say: I love people, and I think there is something good in everyone, but equally I think there is something bad in everyone."

(Writing by Miranda Murray and Matthias Williams; Editing by Mark Heinrich)