Ernst Simon Oppenheim arrived in Arnhem as a German refugee on 28 July 1933. As of September 1941 he lived in a Jewish youth farm in Gouda where he studied to be a gardener and where he was handed out his ID on 23 October 1941. The ID also shows a stamp with which Oppenheim was been exempted from deportation on the 26 October 1942. Ernst Simon Oppenheim was finally deported to Auschwitz via Westerbork on 31 March 1944. In Auschwitz all traces of him are lost.
His younger brother Hans and his mother Flora Oppenheim-Ullmann were deported and murdered in 1943.