Viktor von Ephrussi
Viktor von Ephrussi (November 8, 1860 – February 6, 1945) was an Austrian banker from Odessa. He inherited the Ephrussi & Co. bank in Vienna, which his father Ignaz von Ephrussi had founded. He was knighted by the Austrian emperor in 1872.
On March 7, 1899, he married Baroness Emmy Henriette Schey von Koromla, a woman from a family linked to the Rothschilds. They had four children, including Elisabeth, Gisela, and Ignaz-Iggie.
Viktor lived in the Ephrussi Palace in Vienna. The 1920–1923 inflation nearly ruined him. In May 1938, the Nazis Aryanised his property: the palace, its art collections, and the Ephrussi bank were taken away. Ruined and facing deportation, he first hid in Slovakia at Kövesces, where his wife died, then escaped with his daughter Elisabeth to the United Kingdom in 1938. He died in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1945.
Elisabeth became Austria’s first female Doctor of Letters and later moved to the United States after the Anschluss. Gisela left for Madrid in 1925. Ignaz-Iggie became a fashion designer in Paris, then moved to America, worked in military intelligence, and later exported cereals to Tokyo.
The family’s fate inspired Edmund de Waal’s best-selling book The Hare with Amber Eyes, which tells how the family was scattered by the Nazis and later connected again.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:07 (CET).