In Germany, a Holocaust survivor on the cover of “Vogue”

The German edition of the American magazine puts a Holocaust survivor on the cover of its July-August issue. At over 100 years old, she continues to testify so that “it never happens again.”

Margot Friedländer is 102 years old. Kind eyes, slight smile… The photos were taken in the botanical garden in Berlin. The centenarian, who was 11 when Hitler came to power, plays the model. She poses in a red coat or floral dress from major brands, but sometimes also in her own clothes that she describes as vintage.

The magazine Vogue met her four times for this long portrait. Margot Friedländer explains that she has always been drawn to the world of fashion, and that if fate had not decided otherwise, she would have become a seamstress or stylist.

She is one of the few surviving witnesses to the atrocities of the Nazi regime. : her entire family was exterminated at the Auschwitz camp. At the time, to look “less Jewish” and to escape deportation, Margot Friedländer had her nose done, dyed her hair red and replaced the yellow star with a chain with a cross. But she was denounced and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944. There she met Adolf Friedländer, whom she married shortly after the liberation of the camp. The couple moved to New York, where Margot Friedländer lived for 64 years before returning to Berlin in 2010, after the death of her husband.

Since her return to Germany, Margot Friedländer has been committed to fighting against forgetting, and she tirelessly speaks in schools, before members of the Bundestag, at commemorations, etc. She has created her own foundation. Her wish : that young people in turn become “memory passers”.

“What happened, we can’t change anything anymore… But I want to make it clear that it was inhuman. We are very old and we don’t have much time left. So, you have to be the witnesses, the ones who make sure that this never happens again. It’s in your hands.”

Margot Friedlander

in an interview with the magazine “Der Spiegel”

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, schoolchildren often ask her which side she supports. She then replies : “Don’t look at what separates you, look at what unites you. Be human beings. Be reasonable.”