Margot Friedländer | "For you: Be human!"

How much suffering and pain can a person endure? How many injuries and disappointments? How many insults and abuses? How much fear, every day, for years. For one's own life and the lives of one's loved ones? It is unimaginable, incomprehensible, and remains incomprehensible what was done to people. In the name of an ideology, contemptuous, devoid of any ethical values, any compassion, any mercy – towards the supposedly "other," not belonging to the "master race," ostracized from society and labeled "unworthy" of life, exposed to harassment, humiliation, and disenfranchisement.

Margot Friedländer suffered these torments. And fought. She didn't give up. Even though she was often close to despair. Hopeless. And yet hopeful. A brave woman who long remained silent about the immense injustice done to her and her family during the fascist dictatorship in Germany, only after decades finding the courage to tell her story, ultimately seeing it as her duty to report and to warn others.

Margot Friedländer, born Anni Margot Bendheim on November 5, 1921 in Berlin, died on Friday, May 9, in her hometown at the age of 103. On the day of her death, she was supposed to receive the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. She had been showered with honors and awards in recent years. But they weren't that important to her. What mattered more to her was that people listened to her and learned from her experiences, especially young people, so that they would be protected and prepared against the temptations and promises of new right-wing populists and demagogues.

The daughter of a sales representative and front-line soldier in the First World War, which offered him no protection under the swastika (he was murdered by the Nazis in 1942), and Auguste Gross, a native of Cieszyn (German: Teschen) in southern Poland, who, after an early divorce from her husband, had to make ends meet alone with two small children (running a small button shop in Berlin, more or less), has suffered the depths of human abyss. Numerous attempts to emigrate from anti-Semitic Germany failed, not only due to bureaucratic hurdles and the hostile Nazi state, but also due to the hostile attitude toward migrants, for example, of the US administration in Washington.

In January 1943, one year after the infamous Wannsee Conference and with the murderous deportation machinery to the East already in full swing, the escape to Upper Silesia to visit her mother's relatives seemed almost complete. Then the Gestapo struck. However, they only found Ralph, Margot's brother, three years younger than her, in the Bendheims' apartment. The horror of the mother, upon her later returning home, and her decision to search for her son and support him are something every sensitive person can understand. She left her handbag with a neighbor for her daughter, along with a final, pleading request: "Try to make a living." Margot Friedländer would title her autobiography with this title in 2008.

The 22-year-old is torn when she hears the horrific news of her brother's arrest and her mother's departure. But she is determined to follow her mother's wishes: Try to make a living. In her handbag, she finds an amber necklace and an address book, which initially helps her go into hiding. From then on, Margot is one of the thousands of Jews fleeing from one hiding place to another in the "Reich capital," constantly fearful of being discovered or betrayed. Some help selflessly, staunch Nazi opponents; others demand something in return, financially or sexually. Margot is raped, body and soul. But she remains brave. She owes her survival solely to herself, her courage, her ingenuity. She had her hair dyed Titian red, wore a Christian cross on a chain around her neck, and had her nose operated on so that it no longer corresponded to the anti-Jewish cliché and the Nazi hate caricatures.

In the spring of 1944, she was stopped by "Griffers," as the Jews were called, who were tasked by the Gestapo and SS with handing over hidden Jews. They were blackmailed with threatening her own deportation to a ghetto or extermination camp in the East, or rather, her family members. Margot would only later learn the names of her informers. She was taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There she met Adolf Friedländer again, whom she had known from the Jewish Cultural League when she was sewing costumes for theater performances. He, too, was lonely and alone, torn from his family. Shared misfortune and shared uncertainty united them. It wasn't love at first sight, Margot Friedländer later said.

As late as the fall of 1944, a propaganda film was shot in the camp, which had been established three years earlier as an "old people's ghetto" for Jews in an old fortress in the Czech Republic. It was intended to create the illusion of a "normal life" in the Theresienstadt ghetto: leisure time, soccer, and a family pool. Less than six months later, transports from Auschwitz began arriving at the camp. Both the dead and the apparently living were tipped out of the train cars, as Margot Friedländer recalls. The camp soon became unbearably overcrowded. On May 9, one year after the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht in Berlin-Karlshorst, the Red Army freed the few survivors from their torment.

Margot married her Adolf. They moved to New York in 1946, where she first worked again as a seamstress and then as a travel agent. After her husband died in 1997, she attended a senior citizens' course in biographical writing. One of her first stories was about her liberation from the Theresienstadt concentration camp. A documentary filmmaker noticed her. The first film was made about her and with her in her old hometown of Berlin, to which she only returned in the new millennium and of which she became an honorary citizen. And where she received an honorary doctorate, the Federal Cross of Merit twice, and a Berlin Bear. And in whose Red City Hall she gave a speech on May 7 of that year, two days before her death. " For you. Be human. That is what I ask you to do: Be human! " were her last public words.

The news of her passing broke Friday evening during the German Film Awards ceremony in Berlin. It was Igor Levi who announced it to the esteemed audience. The pianist was supposed to deliver the laudatory speech for the best film score, but, fighting back tears, first delivered a tribute to the "warm-hearted, generous, incredible person" whom he called "a miracle of humanity."

Yes, that was her, Margot Friedländer. She harbored no resentment, no thoughts of revenge, and only wished for one thing: that humanity would prevail among people. Regardless of nationality, religion, origin, or worldview. No more hatred, no more hostility, no more mistrust, no more murder.

She died on May 9th, on the 80th anniversary of her liberation from fascist fanaticism. There seems to be something liberating and comforting about this coincidence of dates. And at the same time, it's a call: Never again. Not just now. But forever. And that means, specifically for today: a ban on the AfD! And all other right-wing extremist movements and groups that are sensing a resurgence in Germany. And a humane migration policy. And a domestic and foreign policy that is guided by the principle of humanity.