Margot Friedländer died

Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer is dead. She died on Friday at the age of 103, the Margot Friedländer Foundation announced.

Friedländer was born Margot Bendheim into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1921. Her mother, brother, and father were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Thanks to the help of many people, she was initially able to go into hiding, but was then captured and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She survived and, after the war, moved to New York with her husband, Adolf Friedländer. Only in her old age did she return to Germany and live in Berlin again since 2010.

There, she tirelessly campaigned against forgetting, published her story , and spoke in schools as a contemporary witness. A prize for student projects on the Holocaust and today's culture of remembrance bears her name. In June 2018—at the age of 96—she became an honorary citizen of Berlin, and an interview book and an illustrated book were published to mark her 100th birthday. In the fall of 2023, ZDF dedicated a docudrama to her —85 years after the pogrom night of 1938.

"I mourn the loss of a deeply impressive woman who also gave me her personal friendship," said Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. "We will all miss Margot Friedländer deeply. We will never forget her." He was originally supposed to award Friedländer the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Friedländer had already received the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon, a lower level of the order, in 2011.