Friedländer was born in Woltersdorf in 1928. Her mother was Jewish and her father was Christian, therefore she was persecuted as "half-Jewish" during the Nazi era and was a forced laborer. When her mother was arrested in early March 1943 as part of the "Fabrikaktion" in the Gestapo collection point Große Hamburger Straße in Berlin, she spent many hours with her father and other partners in mixed marriages waiting outside the collection point. Her mother was eventually released, however, many members of Friedländer's family were deported and murdered in Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and other places. In 1945, Friedländer was forced to work, unpaid, sorting shoes at the Salamander shoe repair shop at Köpenicker Str. 6a-7 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. She later learnt that the shoes had come from people who had been murdered in concentration camps. After the war ended, she studied German language and literature, received her doctorate and studied at Humboldt University of Berlin. She worked first as editor of the literary magazine Die Schatulle from 1957 to 1960 and then at Humboldt University. In 1975 she and her husband went to Warsaw, where she taught at the University of Warsaw. In 1982 she won the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Prize. From 1982 to 1986 she held a professorship for German language at Humboldt University. In 1990 she was co-founder of the Jüdischer Kulturverein Berlin. With the support of the association, she founded a German language school in Berlin, among others for Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe – today's Friedländer School. Friedländer worked in forced labor research at the Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt and was actively involved in the Stolperstein project. Since 2009 there has been a play entitled Vera, which is based on her texts and in which she herself appeared on stage with an independent theatre group for a time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Friedländer worked as an author for Die Weltbühne, among other things. In 2012 an article by her was published in the magazine . Vera Friedländer died in Berlin in October 2019 at the age of 91. She was a great-great granddaughter of Natan Friedland. In March 2020, a memorial plaque for the forced laborers of the Salamander company was attached to the shoe manufacturer's former repair shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg and inaugurated on 21 July 2020.
Publications
Späte Notizen. , Berlin 1982. New edition Man kann nicht eine halbe Jüdin sein. Agimos-Verlag, Kiel 1993; Berlin 2008,. Autobiographical novel.
