Margot Friedländer is a contemporary witness with a moving story. The Holocaust survivor has a difficult past behind her but has never lost her love for people and fashion. At the age of 102, she graces the cover of the fashion magazine Vogue.
Usually it is models in their prime who make it onto the cover of Vogue magazine. In the July/August issue, however, the fashion magazine is dedicating itself to a special woman and her story: Margot Friedländer.
The 102-year-old survived the Holocaust and is therefore considered a contemporary witness of the terrible genocide of European Jews. Friedländer was born in Berlin in 1921 as Anni Margot Bendheim. The daughter of Jewish parents, she grew up as a child of divorce and was raised by her mother along with her younger brother. Her father died in an extermination camp in 1942. Although Bendheim’s family tried several times to emigrate, they were unsuccessful.
The escape to Upper Silesia planned in 1943 also failed because Margot’s brother Ralph was arrested by the Gestapo. The mother finally turned herself in voluntarily so as not to abandon her son. Both were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp – Margot remained behind as a survivor.
She had to change her appearance and find shelter in ever new hiding places in order to escape the Nazis as a Jew. After being arrested in 1944, Margot was placed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she met her future husband Adolf. After being liberated from the concentration camp in 1946, they both managed to take a ship to New York and take American citizenship there.
Margot Friedländer worked as a tailor in New York. As can be read in the interview with Vogue, she was even enrolled at a Berlin arts and crafts school from 1936 onwards and learned fashion and advertising drawing. Her dream was to design clothes herself and become a designer. And even though this dream did not come true, the 102-year-old is committed to spreading love instead of hate.
At the age of 88, she returned to Berlin and has since been a regular guest at Holocaust memorial events. Friedländer has received the Federal Cross of Merit First Class, the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin and an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin.