Viktor, Ritter von Ephrussi (born 8 November 1860 in
Odessa
Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...
; died 6 February 1945 in
Tunbridge Wells was an Austrian banker.
Itinerary
Viktor von Ephrussi was the heir of the Ephrussi & Co. bank in
Vienna, Austria, founded by his father, Ignaz von Ephrussi. Viktor was made a knight (''Ritter'') by the
Emperor of Austria in 1872, at the same time as his father, too, was knighted.
On 7 March 1899, in Vienna, he married Baroness Emmy Henriette Schey von Koromla (1879-1938), from a family linked to the
Rothschilds
The Rothschild family ( , ) is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish family originally from Frankfurt that rose to prominence with Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a court factor to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of F ...
. The couple had four children:
* Elisabeth (1899-1991) (Mrs. Henri de Waal)
* Gisela (1904-1985) (Mrs. Alfredo Bauer)
* Ignaz "Iggie" Leo Karl (1906-1994)
* Rudolf (1918- New York, 1971).
Viktor von Ephrussi lived in the
Ephrussi Palace, at 14 Dr. Karl Lueger-Ring (renamed the ''Universitätsring'' in 2012) in Vienna (Austria).
In 1920-1923, Viktor was nearly ruined by severe inflation.
Nazi persecution
In May 1938, he was robbed of all his property by the Nazis who had just annexed Austria: his palace, its art collections, as well as the Ephrussi bank were "
Aryanised".
Ruined and threatened with
deportation, he first took refuge in Slovakia in his country house in
Kövesces, where his wife died, then, before the advance of the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
, with his daughter Elisabeth in the United Kingdom in 1938, and died in Tunbridge Wells (Kent) in 1945.
Her children left Vienna in the 1920s. Elisabeth was the first woman doctor of letters in Austria and then moved to the United States at the time of the Anschluss. Gisela left for
Madrid in 1925. Ignaz-Iggie became a
fashion designer in
Paris before moving to America as well, enlisting as a military intelligence agent and then exporting cereals to
Tokyo.
Legacy
His great grandson
Edmund de Waal wrote a best-seller about the fate of his family under the Nazis, ''
The Hare with Amber Eyes
''The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance'' (2010) is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. ''. The event reunited the family which had been dispersed in the world by the Nazis.
See also
*
Ephrussi family
The Ephrussi family () is a Ukrainian Jewish banking and oil dynasty. The family's bank and properties were seized by the Nazi authorities after the 1938 "Anschluss", the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
History
The progenitor, Charles J ...
*
Aryanization
*
The Hare with Amber Eyes
''The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance'' (2010) is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal.
*
The Holocaust in Austria
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ephrussi, Viktor Von
Austrian bankers
Ephrussi family
Australian bankers
Jewish Austrian history
Subjects of Nazi art appropriations
Emigrants from Austria after the Anschluss
Jewish art collectors