Berlin, Nov. 28, (dpa/GNA) – A teacher from Hamburg actively opposing anti-Semitism and an association from Lower Saxony organizing workshops to combat fake news are two of this year’s six winners of the Margot Friedländer Prize.
The prize’s namesake, the 103-year-old Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer, presented the awards on Wednesday in Berlin. The awards honour individuals who are committed to tolerance, humanity, and democracy, and who oppose anti-Semitism.
“I engage every day to ensure we do not forget what happened,” Friedländer said at the awards ceremony.
“And I thank everyone who bravely and actively joins my mission. Be human.”
The prizes, with a total endowment of €25,000 ($26,400), were awarded for the first time by Friedländer’s own foundation.
Friedländer, who was born in Berlin in 1921, went into hiding in the city and was eventually sent to the Theriesenstadt concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia. Her father, mother and brother were killed in Auschwitz.
She and her husband, whom she met in Theresienstadt, emigrated to the United States in 1946. After he died, she started to visit Berlin in the 2000s and moved back permanently in 2010 at age 88. She has been telling young people in Germany about the Nazi time ever since.
GNA