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Holocaust survivor Margot Karp finds peace in Dresden
Margot Neuding-Karp, Holocaust survivor, was buried in Dresden in 2025. Her wish granted to honor her family tradition.
Holocaust survivor Margot Karp finds peace in Dresden
On October 10, 2025, Holocaust survivor Margot Neuding-Karp, who died in the USA in 2022 at the age of 102, was ceremoniously buried in the New Israelite Cemetery in Dresden. Her wish to be laid to rest in her birthplace was approved by the Jewish community, although the Jewish burial rite usually calls for burial in the ground at the place of death, as day24 reported. The memorial service and burial took place on Thursday and was attended by the head of the State Association of Jewish Communities, Ekaterina Kulakova, who described the grave as a symbolic new beginning and emphasized Margot's family connection to the city.
Margot Neuding-Karp's moving story begins in Dresden, where she was born into a Jewish family in 1920. Her mother, burdened by the impending dangers of the Nazi regime, took her own life in 1937, while Margot saved her father from a poison overdose. Shortly afterwards she was deported to Poland with her father and made it to England in 1939, where she survived the Second World War. After the war, she joined the US military, where she worked as a translator at the Nuremberg Trials. In 1948 she emigrated to the United States with her husband Martin Karp and built a successful career there, particularly at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago MDR added.
Honorable memory and stumbling blocks
The connection of this remarkable personality to his hometown is not only underlined by his burial. On Friday, the day after the funeral, a stumbling block will be laid in front of the Neuding family's last home at Neustädter Tieckstrasse 15. This type of memorial commemorates the horrors of National Socialism and the fate of the victims. A total of 393 stumbling blocks have currently been laid in Dresden to commemorate the victims and their lives.
The importance of stumbling blocks and similar memorial initiatives is great, as they help to preserve historical memory and shed light on the stories of those affected. Initiatives such as the Central Database of Holocaust Victims' Names Yad Vashem show that finding and documenting these stories is of vital importance. There are an estimated four and a half million murdered Jews in their database, and efforts to track down unidentified names continue. Both initiatives – the Stolpersteine and the Yad Vashem project – remind us of the victims and the importance of keeping their stories alive.
Margot Karp, a symbol of survival and a voice for the forgotten, is now being honored in Dresden, a place that has always had a special meaning for her. Her close connection to the city is further underlined by her tomb, which was deliberately not completed as part of a restoration in order to leave traces of history visible.