Margie Oppenheimer nursed in the Riga ghetto at seventeen, with no bandages and no medicine, and went on to spend twenty-nine years as a licensed practical nurse in Illinois.
Margie Oppenheimer as a nurse after the war. AP Photo, courtesy Margie Oppenheimer.
Oelde
Margie Oppenheimer was born on May 9, 1924 in Oelde, Germany. She was fourteen on the night of November 9, 1938, when she woke to a rifle pointed at her face and her family's home was attacked in the pogrom known as Kristallnacht.
In December 1941 she and her family were deported to the Jewish ghetto in Riga, Latvia. They arrived on December 15.
Nursing in the ghetto
I worked as a nurse at first, very difficult because we had nothing to give the patients — no dressings, no medication, nothing. And the majority of people were frostbitten. Fingers and toes were lost. I remember this nine-year-old boy, all his toes were black with gangrene, and I just cut them off with scissors. He didn't feel a thing and he made it. Another time this lady had gangrene right up to her knees and she was dying. I called the doctor. I started laughing hysterically; it was a reaction that I cannot define. That was the night when I said, 'I am not going to work as nurse any more.'
She was seventeen. Nothing in the account is a metaphor: nursing without supplies means amputating a child's toes with scissors, and the hysterical laughing is a description of what happens to a person doing that work with nothing.
Five camps
Over the following years Oppenheimer was moved through five camps: Sloka in Latvia, Riga-Kaiserwald in Latvia, Bruss-Sophienwalde in Poland, Stutthof near Danzig, and Goddentow. She weighed 56 pounds when she was freed.
Afterwards
She went back to nursing anyway, in spite of what she had said that night in Riga. She worked as a nurse in Europe after liberation and eventually emigrated to the United States. Illinois Board of Nursing records show her holding a licensed practical nurse license in Skokie, Illinois from April 1962 until January 1991 — twenty-nine years.
By 2013 she was living at the Selfhelp Home in Chicago, a residence founded in 1938 by German Jewish immigrants, and was one of a shrinking number of Holocaust survivors there. She spoke publicly about that history for decades, including in the film Refuge: Stories of the Selfhelp Home and in her testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation.
Related
- Levels of nursing
- Nursing in Illinois
- History of nursing
- Internationally educated nurses
- Notable nurses
Sources
- Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust, Lyn Smith, source of Oppenheimer's account of nursing in the Riga ghetto. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Home for Holocaust survivors sees last generation, Sharon Cohen. Associated Press, November 2, 2013. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- A Holocaust survivor's guilt. Here & Now, WBUR, September 9, 2014. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Testimony of Margret Oppenheimer. USC Shoah Foundation Institute, via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accessed September 9, 2026.