Margot Friedländer, a 102-year-old Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered at Auschwitz, would seem an unlikely — even radical — choice to front a fashion glossy that customarily features comely models and celebrities. But a weathered and white-haired Ms. Friedländer is the latest cover star of Vogue Germany, a distinction she seems to wear as lightly as the tailored coat she models on the magazine’s July/August issue.
One of the world’s oldest and perhaps best-known Holocaust survivors, Ms. Friedländer is no stranger to fame. She has met with world leaders like Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, and has rubbed shoulders with A-listers like Helen Mirren.
Ms. Friedländer (nee Bendheim), who lives in Berlin, is a vociferous champion of Holocaust remembrance. She has made it her mission to tour hundreds of schools throughout Germany, urging her young audiences to neither forget past traumas nor cling to the grievances that continue to polarize people.
In the Vogue Germany interview, as in those talks, she expresses concern at the rise of right-wing populism and antisemitism in Germany and throughout the world.
Her multilayered message resonates with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief and global editorial director of Vogue and chief content officer at Condé Nast. While Vogue’s American edition did not feature Ms. Friedländer on its cover and has yet to feature a cover star of her ilk, Ms. Wintour, in an email, called the German Vogue cover “brilliant and inspiring.”
“Margot Friedländer is a wonderful subject, and a meaningful one,” Ms. Wintour said, “given the political currents across Europe.”
People like Ms. Friedländer “are the last living testament to a dark period in history,” said Masha Pearl, the executive director of the Blue Card, an organization in New York that provides financial and emotional assistance to Holocaust survivors across the United States. “To raise awareness for remaining survivors, whose numbers are dwindling, is imperative,” she added.
At 102, Ms. Friedländer has several decades on the eldest American Vogue cover stars, a group that includes the fashion designer Miuccia Prada, who appeared on the magazine’s March cover at 74 this year. But Ms. Friedländer is not the oldest person to appear on a cover of Vogue: Apo Whang-od, a tattoo artist, appeared on the April cover of its Philippine edition at 106-years-old last year.
Ms. Friedländer was 12 when Hitler came to power, and in her early 20s when the Gestapo arrived in 1943 to round up her family, herding her mother onto one of the Nazis’ infamous transports to Auschwitz.
Ms. Friedländer wasn’t home when her family was detained. Soon after, she dyed her hair, started wearing a cross and was hidden for 13 months by anti-Nazi sympathizers whose names she was never permitted to learn, she told The Forward in a 2013 article.
In 1944, she was captured by the Gestapo and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in what is now the Czech Republic. There, she witnessed, and suffered, Nazi atrocities. She also met Adolf Friedländer and, after liberation in 1945, married him in a traditional Jewish ceremony. The following year, the couple emigrated to the United States, settling in Queens, New York.
It was only after her husband’s death, in 1997, that Ms. Friedländer thought of mining her life experience for a memoir. While she was writing it, she was approached by a documentary filmmaker, who persuaded her to tell her story on camera — and to return to Berlin in the early 2000s to film the project.
The documentary, “Don’t Call It Heimweh,” came out in 2004, and her book, “‘Try to Make Your Life’: a Jewish Girl Hiding in Nazi Berlin,” in 2008. Two years later, Ms. Friedländer, then in her late 80s, moved back to Berlin.
She has since addressed thousands of people, speaking, as she told Vogue Germany, “in the name of the victims who can no longer speak for themselves.” Her message is not of forgiveness precisely, but of endurance and the loving embrace of humanity.
Ms. Friedländer told Vogue Germany that, since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, she has been asked by many young people whether she supports Israel or Palestine. Her answer is not to take sides. “Don’t look at the things that separate you,” she tells them. “Think of the things that bind you, that bring you together.”
She is grateful that she “made it” and especially thankful, she told Vogue Germany, that she took to heart the advice of her mother, who, as she was being deported by the Nazis, hurriedly left a note for Ms. Friedländer. In it she wrote: “Try to make your life.”
“I am grateful,” Ms. Friedländer said, “that, yes, I have.”
