Rosa Reis, geb. Springer

Rosa Springer was born in Munich on June 4, 1866, the daughter of the businessman Israel Springer and his wife Babette, née Schwab. She had four siblings: Lina, David, Max and Joseph. Nothing is known about Rosa’s childhood or youth. On December 6, 1886, she married the businessman Emanuel (Emil) Reis. He had been born in Buttenheim near Bamberg on February 28, 1857. Rosa and Emil 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, Rosa and Emil 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. After her husband’s death, Rosa was compelled to move several times: in April 1937 to Adelheidstrasse 35, in 1938 to Isabellastrasse 13 and in April 1941 to the Jewish home for the elderly at Mathildenstrasse 8. In April 1942—now Rosa was seventy-five years old—the Gestapo transferred her to the so-called “Judensiedling Milbertshofen” (“Milbertshofen Jews’ Colony”), a barracks camp at Knorrstrasse 148. From there they deported her to the Theresienstadt Ghetto on June 24, 1942, and from Theresienstadt to the Treblinka extermination camp on September 19, 1942. She was murdered in Treblinka on September 21 or 22, 1942, immediately upon arrival of the train. Her brother Max Springer was on the same transport and met the same fate. The gravestone of her husband Emil Reis bears an inscription in her memory.
Rosa and Emil’s 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 managed to emigrate to New York in 1938. Their daughter Frieda Farnbacher and her husband Fritz were deported from Munich to the Auschwitz concentration camp on March 13, 1943 and murdered.
Although Rosa Reis was my great-grandfather’s sister, only very few personal memories of her have come down to us. In addition to her police identity photo, we see her in two group portraits: one of her as a child with her siblings, and one of her and her husband Emil surrounded by the family on the occasion of Emil’s seventieth birthday. From letters and postcards in the photo album her granddaughter Gertrud Farnbacher (later Karen Hillman) took with her when she emigrated to England from Augsburg, we know that Rosa and Emil Reis and the family of their daughter Frieda, who lived in Augsburg, were very close and visited each other frequently. Karen Hillman also later recalled that Rosa Reis and her sister-in-law and cousin Dorline Springer, who for decades lived very nearby in Munich, were close friends.(Text and translation: Judith Rosenthal; editor: C. Fritsche)