My father, who had moved to Hannover
from Beckum – the town that I was born in...
was no longer a banker,
but had opened an office which
in German was called 'Trusteeship',
but the intention was, in fact, receivership.
Therefore if someone declared bankruptcy
and went to court, the court appointed a receiver.
Because my father had a reputation that
he was 'straight as an arrow'
he was rather sought after.
and that was what he did.
He had an office on the main street.
Sometimes my mother, who had been a secretary by profession,
assisted him when there was too much pressure.
I saw all the commotion of the various parties,
each wearing its own uniform,
through the window or out on the street.
This was increasingly taking over the streets and life in general.
In 1933, in January,
the Nazis came to power.
It was not a dramatic life - changing event – not at all.
At first we thought, well, instead of one prime minister
we will have a different prime minister.
Fine, so he's rather right-wing
and perhaps a bit of a demagogue and he likes to make speeches
and he voices incitement against the Jews
but after he gets used to power,
in a few months, it will all disappear.
Perhaps he will deport some of the Polish Jews from Germany,
which the German Jews would not have been sorry about.
My father – who was apparently an extremely wise man
understood from the outset that something had happened
here from which there was no turning back.
I believe that from that moment
- at the most, two or three months later –
he decided that this was it,
that we would have to leave
while there was still time.
There are many versions of how he decided and what he decided.
One version is that because he was a receiver,
he had lots of dealings with the courts
and once, at one of the trials,
a young lawyer told him,
'We do not need people like you in Germany anymore, Mr Ostermann'.
The other people in the room heard and they didn't react.
My father was so offended and hurt,
that he decided to leave Germany immediately.
That is one version.
But the truth is that perhaps it helped that my father
had been a Zionist from a very young age.
A Zionist in Germany –
that was how the joke went –
that a Zionist is a German who takes money from another German
in order to send a third German to the Land of Israel.
Zionists in Germany did not dream of emigrating
to the primitive land of the 'Hottentots'.
But it could be that it helped him to make a decision
as soon as that happened,
to comprehend, years before the majority of Jews in Germany,
what was about to happen.