Margot Friedlander

Margot Friedländer, née Anni Margot Bendheim, was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. In January 1943, when she was 21, her teenage brother Ralph was arrested by the Gestapo. Her mother Auguste left a message with neighbors for Margot saying that she would go with her son. "Try to make your life," she wrote to her daughter.

A few days later, Ralph and Auguste were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, like Margot's father before them, never to return. For the next 15 months, Margot moved around the city in hiding, aided by an underground network of people. She was eventually arrested and ended up at the concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia, in June 1944. There she met Adolf Friedländer, whom she had known in Berlin as the manager of the Jewish Cultural Federation where she had worked. The camp was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945, and the couple married six weeks later. The following year, the Friedländers immigrated to the USA, settling in New York City, where Adolf Friedländer became an associate executive director at the 92nd Street Y and Margot worked as a travel agent and dressmaker. After her husband's death in 1997, Margot took a writing class at the Y and decided to write her own story. Thomas Halaczinsky, a German filmmaker, heard she was writing a memoir, and wanted to make a documentary about her life. She returned Berlin for the first time in 57 years, which she had sworn never to do, and worked with Halaczinsky on the film, Don't Call It Heimweh (homesickness). It premiered at the 2004 Woodstock Film Festival in New York. Margot's book, Try to Make Your Life: As a Jew Hiding in Berlin (Versuche, dein Leben zu machen: als Jüdin versteckt in Berlin), was published to great acclaim in 2008. She was invited back to Germany, where she began to share her story at schools, organizations, and institutes across the country. In 2009, the book was awarded the Einhard Prize for best autobiography and later became a bestseller.

In 2010, Margot Friedländer moved permanently back to Berlin, where she continued telling her extraordinary story to thousands nationwide and across Europe. Her descriptions of her experience during the war became the narration of an audio guide by Yopegu, enabling listeners to take an interactive city tour of Berlin based on her hiding places.

In 2011, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, and in 2016 she received the Order of Merit of Berlin, the highest award given by the state. In 2014, the Schwarzkopf Foundation gave the first Margot Friedländer Prize, to encourage students and teachers to investigate the Holocaust and Germany's culture of remembrance while fighting anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism. She received the Obermayer German Jewish History Award, Distinguished Service, in 2018.