Margot Friedländer survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She has now died at the age of 103

It was just one sentence: "Try to make a living." When the mother of Margot, then 21, disappeared, this message was conveyed to her daughter by acquaintances. In January 1943, Margot Bendheim, who would later be called Friedländer, suspected that she would never see the most important part of her family again. Her younger brother and mother were murdered immediately after their deportation to Auschwitz. Her father had already fled Germany and been brought to Auschwitz from a French internment camp. He died in 1942.

How does one live as a young Jewish woman in the Reich capital, Berlin? These years spent underground are described in detail in her autobiography by contemporary witness Margot Friedländer, who later appeared at thousands of events. She speaks of the ever-present danger of betrayal. She speaks of people who offered hiding places at the risk of their own lives. And of those who exploited the emergency.

The young woman dyed her hair deep red, wore a necklace with a cross, and had her nose altered. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1944, she was discovered during a police check. So-called "Greifer," Jewish collaborators working for the Gestapo to save themselves, recognized Margot Bendheim. She was arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She survived there and, after liberation, married camp inmate Adolf Friedländer, whom she had already known from Berlin. The two moved to New York in 1946.

Anyone who has ever heard Margot Friedländer will never forget her. The gentle timbre of her voice and the German from another era, preserved over decades. Her husband maintained a strict silence about his experiences during the Holocaust, and she herself made it her mission to tell the story so that it would not be forgotten. Even at over 100 years old, Margot Friedländer performed in Germany and Austria, telling stories from Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s.

At 88, it wasn't too late for her to move back to her old hometown. After seeing Berlin again for the first time while working on the documentary "Don't Call It Homesick," she left her apartment in the New York borough of Queens behind.

In an interview with the NZZ last July, she recounted that within her first hour in Berlin, she thought: "How glad I am to have been born in such a beautiful city! For filming, I even went to our last family apartment on Skalitzer Strasse. I was standing in the room, but there were no negative feelings there either."

She hasn't regretted her return to Germany for a minute. The old lady and the never-again sentiment became a theme in Europe, filled with urgent warnings and a humanitarianism filtered by experience.

In an interview with ARD's "Tagesthemen," Margot Friedländer was once asked about the growing anti-Semitism in Germany. Her response: "I say, be human! We are all equal. There is no Christian, no Muslim, no Jewish blood. There is only human blood. Everything is equal. If you are human, then you will know that a human being would not do something like that."

What people are capable of is revealed in Margot Friedländer's 2008 autobiography, "Try to Make Your Life." The book isn't a black-and-white portrayal. It's full of ruptures. It was thanks to several fortunate coincidences that the young woman was not sent to Auschwitz with her mother and brother, but to Theresienstadt, where she was to be forced to perform wartime-critical labor.

Margot Friedländer was plagued by feelings of guilt at being the only one in the family to survive, but the guilt of the others was also relatively significant. Margot Friedländer's father abandoned the family when he went to Belgium. When her mother asked him to support her in her application to leave, he replied by postcard with a refusal: "What do you want with two children in Shanghai? You can starve in Berlin, too."

Germans had given her refuge in Berlin, but Jewish collaborator Stella Goldschlag handed her over to the Gestapo. In an interview with the NZZ, she recalled: "The Gestapo stood before me three times, and I managed to escape. But then I was caught by Jewish raiders."

Margot Friedländer's life story tells of the continents of humanity and of very real geography. Of her old apartment building on Skalitzer Strasse in Berlin-Kreuzberg, of the now-defunct synagogue on Lindenstrasse, and of the Jewish cultural center 92nd Street Y in New York, where the exiled woman took the "Write Your Memories" writing course after the death of her husband. The American women next to her wrote about pets or happy vacations, but Margot Friedländer began to write down her childhood and youth. Only at night, "when her feelings weren't as blurred as during the day," as she says.

Essentially, Margot Friedländer has never stopped her storytelling in her more than 100 years of life. She has toured German and Austrian schools and spoken at public events. Germany restored her citizenship in 2010 and awarded her the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, in 2023. The docudrama "I am!" was filmed in the same year with the participation of the 102-year-old.

Margot Friedländer wasn't a particularly tall woman, but in her actions she was larger than life in many ways. One of the very last contemporary witnesses. Margot Friedländer was once asked if she was afraid of death. Her answer: "I've looked it in the eye so often, it doesn't scare me anymore." She died on May 9 at the age of 103.