Margot Friedländer – “For you: be people!”

How much suffering and pain can a person endure? How many injuries and disappointments? How many abuse and insults. How much fear, every day, over the years. For your own naked life and the life of his? It is inconceivable, not tangible, still remains incomprehensible what people have been done. In the name of an ideology, inhuman, inhumane, bar of ethical values, Jeweden compassion, any mercy – compared to the supposedly “others”, the “men’s breed” not belonging, exposed to society and as a life for “unworthy”, harassment and disability.

Margot Friedländer suffered these agony. And fought. Not abandoned. Although often close to despair. Hopeless. And yet hoping. A brave woman who has long been silent about her and her huge injustice that had been silent at the time of the fascist dictatorship in Germany, only after decades the courage to tell her story, ultimately regarded and warned it as an obligation.

Margot Friedländer, born as Anni Margot Bendheim on November 5, 1921 in Berlin, died on Friday, May 9th, at the age of 103 in her hometown. On her day of death, she should have received the great Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. It has been showered with honors and awards in recent years. But they weren’t so important to her. It was more important to her that she was listened to, learned from her experiences, especially the youth to be immune and prepared from seduction and promises from new right -wing radical populists and demagogues.

The daughter of a sales representative and front soldier in the First World War, which did not give him protection under the swastika (he was murdered by the Nazis in 1942), and the Auguste Gross, who came from the South Polinic Cieszyn (German: Teschen), who had to get through her husband alone after the early divorce (more badly as a small button in Berlin), has suffered the facets of human. Several attempts to emigrate from anti-Semitic Germany failed, not only because of bureaucratic hurdles and the hostile Nazi state. Also on the migrant-repellent attitude of the US administration in Washington.

When in January 1943, a year after the notorious Wannsee conference and as the murderous deportation machine, the east was already in full swing, the escape to Upper Silesia seemed almost perfect. Then the Gestapo struck. However, she only met Ralph, Margot’s three years younger in the Bendheim’s apartment. The horror of the mother, who later returns home and her decision to seek the son to help him, should be able to understand. At a neighbor, she left her handbag for the daughter and one last, please plead: “Try to make your life.” Margot Friedländer will title her autobiography in 2008.

The 22-year-old is torn back and forth when she experiences the horror message of the brother’s arrest and the mother’s progress. But she is willing to follow the mother’s wish: try to make your life. In her handbag she finds an amber chain and an address book that initially helps her to go into being. From then on, Margot is one of the thousands of Jews who flee from a hiding place to another in the “Reich capital”, to be constantly discovered or betrayed the fear on the neck. Some help unselfishly, are convinced Nazi gegers, others demand consideration, financially or sexually. Margot is raped on the body and soul. But she remains brave. She owes her survival solely and her courage, her courage, her ingenuity. It can be dyed the hair of titan red, carries the Christian cross on a chain around the neck, can be operated on the nose so that it no longer corresponds to the anti-Jewish cliché, the Nazi rush caricatures.

In the spring of 1944, she got into a control of “Greiben”, as the Jews are called, who are supposed to deliver hidden Jews on behalf of Gestapo and SS, with the threat of threatening their own deportation into a ghetto or extermination camp in the east or their family members. Margot will only experience the name of her denunciators later. She is brought to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There she meets Adolf Friedländer, whom she knows from the Jewish Cultural Federation, when she tailored costumes for theater performances. He too is lonely and alone, his family snatched. Common misfortune, common uncertainty combines them. It was not love at first glance, says Margot Friedländer later.

In autumn ’44, a propaganda film was filmed in the three years earlier three years earlier as a “age ghetto” for Jews in an old fortress in the Czech Republic in an old fortress in the Czech Republic, which is supposed to pretend a “normal life” in the Theresienstadt ghetto: leisure, football, family pool. Not half a year later, transport from Auschwitz arrived in the camp. Deads like apparently living are tipped out of the wagons, as Margot Friedländer remembers. The warehouse will soon be unbearable. On May 9th, a year after the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht in Berlin-Karlshorst, the Red Army frees the few survivors from its pain.

Margot marries her Adolf. They moved to New York in 1946, where she initially works as a seamstress and then as a travel broker. After her husband died in 1997, she attended a senior course for biographical writing. One of her first stories is about her liberation in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. A documentary filmmaker becomes aware of you. A first film about her and with her in her old hometown of Berlin, to which she only returns in the new Millennium and her honorary citizen will become. And where she receives university doctors, twice the Federal Cross of Merit and a Berlin bear. And in whose red town hall she gives a speech on May 7 of this year, two days before her death. »For you. Be people. This is what I ask you to do: be people!« were their last public words.

The news of her death burst into the ceremony of awarding the German Film Award in Berlin on Friday evening. It was Igor Levi who told her to the honorable audience. The pianist was supposed to consider the laudation to be the best film music, but, fighting with tears, only held a tribute to the “warm, generous, incredible person”, whom he called “a miracle of humanity”.

Yes, that was her, Margot Friedländer. She had no resentment, no revenge, only wanted one thing: that humanity was among people. No matter what nationality, which religion, which origin, which worldview. No more hatred, no hostility, no distrust, no more murders.

She died on May 9th. On the 80th anniversary of their liberation from fascist fanaticism. There seems to be something liberating, comforting of this dating. And at the same time a request: never again. Not just now. But always. And that also means specifically for today: ban on the AfD! And all other right -wing extremist trends and groups, which are sensitive in Germany, again. And a human migration policy. And an interior and foreign policy that is borne by the bid of humanity.