Icek Ostrowicz was born into a Jewish family in the Polish city of Kielce on 15 August 1927. He had just turned twelve when the German Wehrmacht invaded his homeland. As a Jew, he was no longer allowed to attend school. In 1941, he and his parents and his three siblings were forced to move to the city's Jewish ghetto. Because he was classified as "fit for work", he was later deployed in various forced labour and concentration camps. During the clearing of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp in February 1945, he was driven to the Mittelbau concentration camp. There he received the inmate number 115,745. In the following months, he was transferred to various subcamps of the Mittelbau concentration camp complex in the southern Harz region, including Harzungen and the Boelcke-Kaserne in Nordhausen. In April 1945, the SS forced him onto another clearance transport. On 12 April 1945, he was liberated near Magdeburg by US troops. He later referred to this day as his "second birthday".
He then returned to Poland and learned that his parents and siblings had been killed in Treblinka. A total of 40 of his family members were murdered in the Shoah. Icek Ostrowicz was the only one to survive. In July 1946, he witnessed the anti-Semitic pogrom in his hometown of Kielce, in which more than 40 Jews were murdered. He decided to return to the country of the perpetrators. Via Türkheim near Munich, he arrived in Mönchengladbach in 1947. He would spend the rest of his life there.
He married, had a daughter and two grandchildren, and became a successful textile entrepreneur. At the same time, he was involved in the Jewish community of Mönchengladbach, of which he was an honorary member. He donated two new Torahs to the community, as well as a curtain for the Torah ark in the synagogue. Because he was denied an appropriate school and university education, equitable access to education was particularly important to him. As a member of the board of the Gerhard C. Starck Foundation, which he co-founded, he awarded educational scholarships to Jews. He was honoured with the Federal Cross of Merit in 2023 for his services, but such recognition was not what drove him. He once admitted that the loss of his parents and siblings was something he carried with him throughout his entire life. Education was therefore of particular importance to him, something that "nobody can take away from you".
We have now been informed that he passed away on 25 September 2024 at the age of 97. Our thoughts and condolences are with his family and friends.
