‘My Birth Was a Miracle’ (Exclusive)

Diane von Furstenberg credit her mom, Liliane Haflin, with instructing her plenty of useful life classes. 

What Haflin, a Holocaust survivor, skilled at Auschwitz, additionally shapes each one in every of von Furstenberg’s days. 

“My first gratitude day-after-day is that my mom survived [the Holocaust],” the designer tells PEOPLE as she discusses her trailblazing profession forward of the discharge of the documentary Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge.

Within the movie, which premiered on the Tribeca Film Festival June 5 and involves Hulu within the U.S. and Disney+ internationally June 25, von Furstenberg discusses her late mom’s life and legacy. 

Chatting with PEOPLE, von Furstenberg shares, “My mom was a 21-year-old lady, and she or he was passing faux papers to Jewish folks. She was arrested as a result of she was doing resistance.”

“She was so afraid that she was going to be tortured to offer names of the others that she [told officers], ‘I don’t know something. I’m hiding right here as a result of I’m Jewish.’ A girl on the police station the place she was taken stated, ‘Don’t inform them you’re Jewish as a result of they’re going to take you away.’ However anyway, it was too late,” she says.

Von Furstenberg shares that subsequent her mom was taken to a jail, which occurred to be at a army college that had been transformed. It was a “stunning” constructing with an unpleasant objective: it served as a holding place for folks to be despatched to focus camps. 

“They might keep there till they had been 1,000. And once they had been 1,000, they’d take them to the prepare to go to Auschwitz,” von Furstenberg says. 

However by the point her mom bought arrested, she was on one of many final convoys to go away the jail, so, von Furstenberg says, “[after] she stayed there 9 days, they crammed [the train with] 507 folks, and she or he was shipped.”

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Von Furstenberg’s mom miraculously survived, and in doing so, the legendary designer says, “She has a dynasty of seven on my facet and 5 on my brother’s facet. [No one] could be there until she had survived.”

Due to this fact, the gratitude she expresses day-after-day, “has to do with honoring life.”

Whereas on the truck which transported her to the prepare to Auschwitz, Haflin by some means bought maintain of a chunk of cardboard, on which she wrote a observe to her mother and father, then threw it on the highway within the hope it’d get to them. 

“I by no means believed that [story],” von Furstenberg says. “And she or he didn’t know [whether] these notes had arrived, as a result of after she was liberated, no person needed to speak concerning the info.”

“However after my mom handed away and her sister handed away, my cousin introduced me a field filled with pictures. Inside that field of pictures, there was an envelope. It was very, very flat as a result of it had been there for 50 years. And I opened that envelope and I discovered the notes. And that was, wow,” von Furstenberg says. “I couldn’t imagine it.”

In the meantime, the army college that served because the jail the place her mom was earlier than she was despatched to Auschwitz “grew to become a really, very costly residence constructing,” von Furstenberg says. 

“The folks determined they needed to do one thing, so once they constructed a constructing for parking throughout that has no home windows, they put the images of the 26,000 individuals who had been arrested from there [on an outside wall].

“The survivors, that are only one,300 one thing, they injected shade.”

Amongst these coloured pictures is one in every of Haflin. It’s a memorial von Furstenberg has visited just a few occasions, together with lately whereas filming the documentary. 

“It was very fascinating as a result of they’re filming me, and I flip round and everybody who’s within the movie firm was in tears. And I wasn’t, as a result of you know the way it’s: when it’s your self, it’s important to construct your self energy.”

Inside energy was instilled in von Furstenberg from a younger age.

“I used to be born 18 months after my mom was only a few bones in a area of ashes. She wasn’t speculated to survive, however she survived, and my start was a miracle,” von Furstenberg says. 

“She used to say, ‘God saved me in order that I may give you life. By supplying you with life, you gave me my life again. You might be my torch of freedom.’ She by no means needed me to be afraid, or to be a sufferer. So I used to be skilled to show any adversity into a possibility: If you happen to personal your imperfections, they develop into your belongings. If you happen to personal your vulnerability, you flip it into energy.” 

Says von Furstenberg: “I used to be molded like that.”

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Diane von Furstenberg: Girl in Cost, which premiered on the Tribeca Film Festival June 5, was directed by Academy Award winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Trish Dalton, and produced by Fabiola Beracasa Beckman, Tracy Aftergood and Sean Stuart in addition to Obaid-Chinoy and Dalton.

Watch the movie, a Sutter Highway Image Firm and Particle Tasks/Fabiola Beracasa Beckman Media manufacturing, on Hulu on June 25.