Her father, Herman Margolis, was a halutz and agronomist and her mother Cecilia was the daughter of Dr. Solomon Schwartz, the personal physician to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

In January 1939, Margolis became the first female field agent of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee when Cecilia Razovsky of the National Refugee Service, an agency associated with the JDC, hired her to go to Cuba.

When the MS St. Louis with its 900 passengers was approaching Havana harbor in May 1939, Margolis tried to find a port of entry in either Cuba, the United States or Canada, but the ship was forced to return to Europe.

[3] In the months before the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Margolis modernized the soup kitchens, making them more efficient and better able to serve the refugee community.

Margolis returned to the United States in December 1943, where she found out for the first time about the extent of the extermination of the Jews in Europe and the existence of the concentration camps.

[3] She arrived in Lisbon in March 1944 and then traveled to Spain, where she was active in arranging a home for children smuggled over the Pyrenees Mountains from France.