Family Josef and Henriette Oster

In Nordhorn's main street the Oster family ran a textile business, known mainly for work clothes. They did not belong to the old-established Jewish families, but had immigrated. The family had two children: Max, the older one, and Margarete, called „Gretl“. Max married Ruth Rochacz from Leipzig. Both fled to the Netherlands in 1935, where two children were also born, Helga and Benjamin.

In 1942, after the Überfall of the Wehrmacht, the family was taken to the „Judendurchgangslager Westerbork“. From here the father, Max, was deported to Buchenwald via Auschwitz, KZ Groß-Rosen, where he died at the age of 38.

His wife and the two children were transported to Auschwitz in November 1942 and murdered there immediately after arrival.

Daughter „Gretl“ fled to England in 1939 – with the intention of preparing everything to catch up with her parents. The beginning of the war thwarted the plan. So Margarete üsurvived.

The parents had already gotten rid of the business and their apartment building in 1938: In the course of the Aryanization and the confiscation of Jewish property they had to leave the house and move together with other Jewish families into the Jewish house in Prollstra&szlig 5, from where they were deported to Riga in December 1941 with the so-called „Bielefeld Transport“. There their trace is lost.

On the basis of the Oster family, one can trace the essential fates of the Nordhorn Jüdische families:

• Who fled to the Netherlands, came after 1940 über Westerbork but in the death camps (if one has not survived as „Versteckter“ überlebt);
• who fled early enough further away (England, USA, Palästina, Argentina), has überlebt;
• who remained in Nordhorn, was resettled in the „Judenhaus“ and then sent with the „Bielefeld Transport“ 1941 in the Riga ghetto to death.