Emma Steinitz, geb. Kalmus

Emma Kalmus was born in Neumarkt near Wroclaw on December 26, 1861, the daughter of the businessman Markus Kalmus and his wife Rosalie. Nothing is known about Emma’s childhood and youth. On February 10, 1890 she married the businessman Ludwig Steinitz from Cusel in present-day Rhineland -Palatinate and moved to Munich with him. It was there that their two children were born: Hertha on February 12, 1892 and Erich Emanuel on August 1, 1895. In 1898, after her husband’s early death, Emma Steinitz and her brother-in-law Georg Steinitz became partners in a silk and linen goods business with a factory for ladies’ hats and corsets. From 1907 onwards she and her children lived at Marienplatz 24.
After the Nazi accession to power, the Steinitzes were subjected to ostracism, persecution and the expropriation of their business because they were Jews. In late 1940 they were forced to leave their home on Marienplatz and move to a so-called “Judenwohnung” (“Jews’ apartment) at Goethestrasse 74. Emma Steinitz died of a stroke there on April 2, 1941. On November 20, 1941, the Gestapo deported her children Hertha and Erich Steinitz to Kaunas in Lithuania along with some 1,000 other Jewish men, women and children of Munich. The entire group of deportees were shot to death by SS troops there on November 25, 1941. (text Barbara Hutzelmann, editor C. Fritsche, translation J. Rosenthal)