Mathilde Böckelmann lived with her family in Pustow, a village near Greifswald, from 1935. Her husband was an officer on the front during the war. In January 1945 an acquaintance asked her to take in Miriam Fernbach from Berlin on her estate. Under the false name of Margot Friedrich, the Jewish girl worked in the house and the stables. Böckelmann’s two small daughters did not know their “guest” was Jewish. Miriam Fernbach was liberated by the Red Army’s arrival at the end of April 1945. In 1947 she emigrated to Palestine with her parents, who had survived in Magdeburg and Berlin.
Mathilde Böckelmann was dispossessed of her property in the German Democratic Republic and later moved to West Germany. She never spoke about the events of the last war months. In 2015 she was honored posthumously by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.