Emma Fridezko (geb. Kraus)

Emma Kraus was born in Jitschin in Bohemia [today: Jičín in the Czech Republic] as the legitimate daughter of the Jewish merchant Jacob Kraus and Ernestine, née Kantor. The Jewish family of eleven ran a business empire in Bohemia. One of her brothers was the later famous writer Karl Kraus. Nothing has survived about her education. When Emma Kraus was 17 years old, the family moved to Vienna to further expand the business empire.

In 1883, at the age of 23, Emma Kraus married the Jewish shoe manufacturer Julius Fridezko and subsequently became the mother of a son and a daughter. The marriage broke up in 1899, Julius Fridezko remarried, but Emma Fridezko remained unmarried.

After the divorce, Emma Fridezko lived with her children in London for a long time before returning home to Vienna. In 1915, her son was killed as a soldier in World War I near Malga. In 1928, she was appointed to the board of directors of the 'Deutschlandsberger Papierfabriken' and remained in this position until the occupation of Austria in 1938.

On March 12, 1938, Emma Fridezko witnessed the downfall of free and independent Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. With the occupation of Austria, German legislation is adopted and with it the 'Nuremberg Race Laws', according to which Emma Fridezko is considered a 'full Jew'.

Her property is 'aryanized' and she is forced to move into a collective apartment at Czerninplatz 4 in Vienna's 2nd district. From there, she was deported together with her sister Louise Drey to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on July 22, 1942 and from there to the extermination camp or Treblinka concentration camp on September 21, 1942. She was murdered there after September 21, 1942.