Theo Coster

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Theo Coster (* 1928 ) is a game inventor, filmmaker and author. He was a classmate of Anne Frank in the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam and made a documentary and a book about his school class.

Life

Coster had Portuguese ancestors, but his grandfather already lived in the Netherlands. He was born in Leeuwarden , became a typesetter and later owned the Coster printing company in Amsterdam, which his son and later his grandson continued for a time.

Jacques Presser

Theo Coster was born as Maurice Simon Coster; his mother was from Belgium. He had a sister named Freddy three years older than him. When the Jews in Amsterdam were forced to send their children to Jewish schools in September 1941, he was enrolled in the Jewish Lyceum and entered the class that Anne Frank attended. He had celebrated his bar mitzvah shortly before . He attended school for about two years; his teachers included Jaap Meijer and Jacques Presser .

Coster left class 1L2, which at times consisted of 30 children, 17 of whom were killed in the concentration and extermination camps, even before Anne Frank: In order to survive, the members of the Coster family went into hiding or left the country: Freddy Coster was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Belgium, Maurice Simon was housed with the childless couple Suus and Barend van Beek in Vaassen . He got there in a roundabout way: When the arrest of the Coster family seemed imminent, Coster's father asked a Jewish neighbor to take the boy in on short notice. The same evening he handed his guest over to a friend who worked for Rademakers Haagse Hopjes and lived in the Ijselstraat. The boy stayed there for about a month before a liaison officer took him to Vaassen. There Pastor van Deelen looked after the child and made sure that it was accommodated with a family called Zweers on the De Wulfte farm near Deventer . After three months, however, this accommodation was no longer safe and Coster was placed with the childless couple van Beek.

There he was considered the nephew of the host Barend van Beek, who was the rector of the Christian elementary school on site. He had to get a new first name and chose the name Theo after the hero of a youth book that he had enjoyed reading. He later kept this name. Coster was able to move around relatively freely in his quarters in Vaassen, collect leaflets from the allied organization De Vgende Hollander and even visit the school in Apeldoorn under his false name . It was only long after the war that he found out that almost the entire village had been informed of his identity.

The fact that he was able to move relatively unconcerned in relation to other people in hiding was due, among other things, to the fact that a few years earlier his father had not filled in the registration form for the boy's grandparents requested by the National Socialists. Instead, this form had later been processed by an official who, for some inexplicable reason, had certified that Coster had only two and not, as in reality, four Jewish grandparents. His passport was not stamped with a black “J”, as was customary for “full Jews”. Coster's mother, who did not look Jewish, visited the van Deelen family once a month. There she could meet her son from time to time, while the father had to hide in Hattem the whole time . From the late summer of 1944, Ms. Coster also lived in the van Beeks' house. Outwardly, especially after the neighboring school had been occupied by the Waffen SS, she was considered an aunt of Theo Coster.

The period of hiding ended on April 17, 1945. Theo Coster's father, whose printing works had been destroyed in the war and had to be rebuilt, could not finance him to study chemistry, as the son would have liked. Instead, Coster attended the secondary technical school in Nyenrode and completed a two-year training there; then he did his military service and then attended the graphic school in Amsterdam. He then did a one-month internship at Het Volk , then worked for two more months in the newspaper's correction department and then went on a trip to Sweden. There he gained experience in two branches of the Öberg printing company. He was in Stockholm when he learned of an accident that forced him to return to Amsterdam: his parents had an accident with the van Beek couple on a road trip through Belgium. While the two women in the backseat were less seriously injured, Barend van Beek was left permanently paralyzed and Coster's father suffered a complicated broken leg that required several years of rehabilitation. When he returned to his print shop after three years and took up the post of director that Theo Coster had taken over in the meantime, the son left the company and became technical editor at De Joodse Wachter , whose editor was Coster's former teacher Meijer.

Who is it?

Reading the articles in this paper gave him the idea of ​​looking for a job in Israel. He eventually found, with the Queen's approval , a job at a branch of the Israeli state printing company in Jerusalem, where he was to stay for two years before moving to a paper mill due to a lack of promotion opportunities.

The trip from Amsterdam to Israel had Coster in April 1955, a newly bought scooter brand Batavus begun. On the way he worked for a while in Mersin as the overseer of the warehouse of the workers' settlement that was needed for the construction of the new port. After suffering from amoebic dysentery , Coster took a ship to Haifa in August 1955 . In a kibbutz where he was trying to improve his knowledge of Hebrew, he met a man named Noj during his time at the paper mill, who put him in touch with a printing company in Tel Aviv , whose technical director Coster then became. In the house of Mr. Noj Coster also met his future wife Ora Rosenblat. Coster had not initially planned to stay in Israel, but then took up his permanent residence in Tel Aviv. His career as a game developer then emerged from the contract to develop a promotional gift. Theo and Ora Coster founded Matat in 1965 , later renamed Theora Design . They have created numerous successful articles. In 1979 they brought the game Who is it? on the market that became internationally known.

With his wife Ora, Coster had sons Boaz and Gideon, who work in the family business.

Coster, who had called himself Theo since his time with the van Beeks, later also officially requested his name change, so that his papers were finally Theo Maurice Simon Coster.

Film and book about Anne Frank's school class

In 1948 Coster read Anne Frank's diary for the first time , but it took decades before he came up with the plan for his film project on the high school class and wrote a book about it.

In 2001 the book Absent by Dienke Hondius came out, which dealt with the gradual disappearance of children and young people from the class lists of the Lyceum in the years 1941 to 1943. For the presentation of this book, surviving former students were invited, including Coster. He had already spoken about the past in front of school classes and other groups, was confronted at the meeting with the fact that there would soon be no more living witnesses to the past, and in 2007 he was inspired by his wife to make a documentary shape about his old class. Since the meeting on the occasion of the book presentation, Coster was in contact with Nanette Blitz Konig , who in turn was able to establish contact with other surviving classmates: Jacqueline van Maarsen , Lenie Duyzend , Albert Gomes de Mesquita and Hannah Goslar , who was then living in Jerusalem . With his friend, director Eyal Boers , he tackled the film project. After numerous meetings with the survivors of the school class and other contemporary witnesses, Anne Frank's film Classmates was completed in spring 2008. It was shown publicly for the first time in the Cinematheque in Tel Aviv. In April 2009 he received the Silver Ace Award at the Las Vegas International Film Festival . In the same month it was shown on television in Israel and in December 2009 on Dutch television KRO. Coster's book, which is based on the same materials as the film, was published in 2009. The German edition is entitled In a Klasse mit Anne Frank .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Theo Coster Death
  2. Granaat ontploft in het Apeldoorns kanaal , May 3, 2010, at: www.destentor.nl
  3. Homepage of Theora Design
  4. a b Theo Coster at www.convilleandwalsh.com
  5. Data on Theo Coster on www.annefrankdiaryreference.eu ( Memento of the original from January 1, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.annefrankdiaryreference.eu.pn
  6. ^ Theo Coster, In a class with Anne Frank . From the Dutch by Mirjam Pressler , FA Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-7766-2670-4 , especially pp. 10–34 and 170–179