1 DON'T CALL IT HEIMWEH A 60 minute documentary by Thomas ...

espected his decision and except for a very few short visits during the last 60
years they didn’t set foot onto German soil.
When her husband passed away five years ago, Margot lost the person who had
given her strength and a sense of purpose in her life. Seventy eight years old
she had to set out to redefine herself and to find once again her own identity.
She joint a memoir writing class at the 92nd street Y in New York City and
inspired by the class started to write her story. With it came a feeling of anger,
and a deep sadness paired with the longing for “going home” or Heimweh, as
the Germans would say, a truly conflicting feeling for a Jewish woman who 60
years ago as a young girl survived Nazi Germany hidden by Germans in Berlin.
“Don’t call it Heimweh”, demands her cousin and childhood friend Gene, who
had escaped Germany before the progroms had started. But for Margot the
immediate Holocaust experience was different than for most others. Rescued
by Germans and eventually betrayed by Jewish catchers she kept an affinity for
Germany throughout her life.
Margot Friedlander, her mother and her younger brother Ralph lived in Berlin
until 1943. The parents had divorced in 1938 and the father had left the family
and escaped to Belgium where he later was caught and deported to Auschwitz.
In 1943 only very few Jews were left in Berlin, the Nazis were determined to
arrest every Jew and to make Berlin Judenfrei (free of Jews) as they called it.
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