Family Benjamin and Rosa de Vries

The de Vries family, for decades at home in Nordhorn and widely branched out as a family, operated a textile trade in Neuenhauser Straße with Benjamin de Vries and his wife Rosa née Cohen. The merchant was regarded in Nordhorn as a noble, friendly and upright person. After Rosa de Vries died in 1923, son Moritz took over her place in the business.

Moritz de Vries married Ella Hopfeld, also from a Nordhorn textile merchant family. Their sons Robert and Paul were born in 1924 and 1926.

On Pogrom Night November 9/10, 1938, SA men came to haunt the family. They pushed 78-year-old Benjamin de Vries outside, beat him up, pulled him by his beard and finally threw him into the dirt of the street.

He and his son Moritz were arrested and ended up in the Sachsenhausen/Oranienburg concentration camp near Berlin via Osnabrück.

After the return of the two men on November 27, 1938, the whole family fled to Borne near Hengelo in the Netherlands via Rotterdam in May 1939.

There Benjamin de Vries died on September 20, 1940, at the age of 80, and found his grave there in the Jewish cemetery. However, a gravestone could only be placed in 2012.

From February 27, 1940, Moritz, Ella, Robert and Paul were imprisoned in the transit camp Westerbork/NL. From there, the parents were deported to the Auschwitz death camp on February 2, 1953, and murdered immediately after arrival, on February 5, 1943.

Robert and Paul de Vries survived the Westerbork camp. Robert emigrated to the United States after liberation (to Oak Park, Michigan) and lived there until 2003; Paul emigrated to Israel, now with the name "Uri," and died there in 1994.

The house on Neuenhauser Straße had been taken over by the Rolinck brewery Burg-Steinfurt in the course of the "Aryanization" of 1938/39.