Be Human: The Legacy of Margot Friedländer

Some people survive history. And then there are those rare souls who become it. The world has lost one of its last living bridges to the Shoah’s unfathomable abyss. Margot Friedländer passed away at 103. But make no mistake: her death is not the closing of a chapter. It is a challenge hurled straight at us, the living.

I met Margot once in Berlin. What began as a brief conversation ended as something altogether different: an imprint. There was a gravity in her eyes that words can’t quite hold, a depth that made you feel she wasn’t just looking at you, but through you, and far beyond. Into history. Into the quiet rooms of betrayal and bravery. Into the gasps of those who didn’t get to tell their stories. And so she never looked away. Not once.

Try to make your life. Those were the last words Margot’s mother spoke before being deported, alongside Margot’s 17-year-old brother Ralph, to Auschwitz, where both were murdered. Margot, 21 and utterly alone, was left behind to carry not just her fragile survival, but the unlived futures of those she loved.

What followed is both well-known and unbearable: she dyed her dark hair a bold red, a desperate disguise to escape the eyes of Nazi informers. She wore a crucifix, and every touch reminded her of the Jewish identity she refused to forsake. She hid in Berlin’s basements and attics, her heartbeat syncing with the thunder of jackboots overhead. When the dragnet finally closed around her, she was arrested and sent to Theresienstadt, a place the Nazis cynically paraded as a “model ghetto,” but which was, in truth, a purgatory of starvation and death.

But Margot’s greatness was never defined by what was done to her. It was forged in what she chose to do with it.

Many survivors never spoke, and their silence, too, is sacred. But Margot chose the harder path. She became a witness, not out of self-interest or for applause, but because she understood something we often shy away from today: memory is a form of resistance.

And she wielded it like a sword, sharp, unflinching, necessary. She returned to Berlin, the city that once hunted her, when no one thought she ever would. She stood before the children and grandchildren of the people who had turned her life to ash, and she told them everything: the terror, the betrayals, the weight of a hastily packed suitcase on the night her world ended. And then, astonishingly, she forgave. Not to absolve, but to heal. Not to erase, but to remember louder.

Her mantra? Two words: “Be human.”

We live in an age drowning in slogans, hashtags, and empty gestures. But when Margot said, “Be human,” it was not a platitude but a prayer and warning fused because no one knew better than she what happens when people choose to be less than human.

She visited schools week after week. She didn’t just recite history and relive it for each generation, ensuring every student in every room understood: “When I am gone, you will be my witnesses.”

Margot’s death is not just the loss of a person. It’s the extinguishing of one of our era’s brightest moral compasses. But it also leaves us with no excuse. Margot did not just give us her story; she warned us as antisemitism crept back from the shadows: the desecrated synagogues, the slurs muttered on subways, the demonstrations masked as “protests” but pulsing with ancient hatreds. Even frail and weary, Margot refused to mince words. She looked at Germany and the world and said, “This is how it began.” And she was right.

We must not dare comfort ourselves by thinking her story is history. It is prophecy, too, a warning of what happens when vigilance fades and when good people grow too tired to fight the rot. Margot knew that all too well. Her life proved that evil doesn’t announce itself with sirens; it creeps in quietly, dressed in respectability, until it’s too late.

For Jews, remembrance is not optional. It is not a ceremony. It is an act of defiance, an act of love, an act of survival. It is oxygen.

And today, as we mourn Margot Friedländer, we must breathe in her memory with reverence and rage. Not the blind rage of vengeance, but the focused fury of purpose. We must carry her torch, as heavy and searing as it is, and shine it on every dark corner where hate festers.

Because that is what Margot asked of us, and now, in her absence, it is what the dead demand of the living. Let us not let her down.