Emanuel (auch: Emil) Reis

Emanuel (Emil) Reis was born in Buttenheim near Bamberg on February 28, 1857. Nothing is known about his family, childhood or youth. He became a businessman by profession and moved to Munich on December 3, 1877. He married Rosa Springer there on December 6, 1886. Emil and Rosa Reis had three children: Ludwig, born on September 13, 1887, Fritz, born on April 12, 1891, and Frieda, born on August 17, 1895. The Reis family lived on the third floor of the house at Hackenstrasse 4 from 1893 onwards.
In 1935, Emil and Rosa Reis moved from Hackenstrasse 4 to Agnesstrasse 53. It is not clear whether this move came about as a result of anti-Semitic persecution. Emil died on November 29, 1936 in Munich and was laid to rest in the Neuer Israelitischer Friedhof, section 18, row 1, no. 1.
Emil’s wife Rosa did not survive the Holocaust. On June 25, 1942 the Gestapo deported her to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and on September 19, 1942 from there to the Treblinka extermination camp. She was murdered in Treblinka on September 21 or 22, 1942, immediately upon arrival of the train. Emil’s gravestone bears an inscription in memory of Rosa. Their daughter Frieda Farnbacher and her husband Fritz were deported from Munich to the Auschwitz concentration camp on March 13, 1943 and murdered. Their son Ludwig fled to China, possibly Shanghai, in May 1941 and emigrated from there to the U.S. by way of England. Fritz Reis had already managed to emigrate to New York in 1938.
Emil Reis was the husband of my great-great-aunt Rosa, but hardly any personal memories about him have come down in the family. We have only one photo of him, showing him with his family on his seventieth birthday in 1927. From letters and postcards in the photo album his granddaughter Gertrud Farnbacher (later Karen Hillman) took with her when she emigrated to England from Augsburg, we know that Emil and Rosa Reis and the family of their daughter Frieda, who lived in Augsburg, were very close and visited each other frequently .(Text and translation: Judith Rosenthal; editor: C. Fritsche)