Hacker-Glanz Family Collection

Gertrude Glanz was born in Vienna, Austria on April 13, 1920 as the daughter of the photographer Jakob Glanz and his wife Margarethe née Freundlich. Gertrude worked in her father’s studio and became a photographer herself. Her father Jakob Glanz was arrested on Kristallnacht and imprisoned in Dachau. He was released on the condition that the family leave the country immediately. Gertrude emigrated with her parents to Shanghai in March of 1939. Her father died in March of 1948. Gertrude immigrated to the United States in January of 1949. She married Herbert Herzfeld in April 1949 and set up a photography studio in Jamaica, Queens (New York). In 1961, Gertrude divorced her first husband, shut down her New York studio, and married Emil Hacker.

Emil Hacker was born on February 17, 1911 in Vienna, Austria. He emigrated to Shanghai in 1939, where he worked in the offices of the Committee for the Assistance of European Jewish Refugees in Shanghai and the American Joint Distribution Committee’s Shanghai branch. He married his first wife, Ellen Marie (Marion) Richheimer (born May 7, 1922), on May 30, 1945 and immigrated to the United States with her and their son Fred George in 1947. In the U.S., Emil worked as an accountant. Emil Hacker and Gertrude née Glanz married in 1961 in San Francisco. In 1965, the couple moved to Denver, where Emil died in 1977.

Gertrude née Glanz’s uncle, Heinrich Glancz, was a salesman in Vienna. He married and later divorced Lilly née Wetterschneider in 1927 in Vienna. He emigrated to Shanghai and later to the United States. He died in 1960 in New York.