Eugenie Rapaport-Porada came from a wealthy Jewish family. In 1863 she married the industrialist Heinrich Friess (1860–1922) from the Friess-Redlich family, who owned agricultural properties and shares in sugar factories in various regions of the monarchy (including Enns, Upper Austria, and Moravia). In 1896 her son Jan (Hans) Friess was born, and the family lived in Vienna and Moravia. In December 1938, at the age of sixty-seven, she fled from the Nazis and lived together with her son in St Peter, Barbados. She moved to Canada at the latest in 1948 and then in 1951, with her second husband and cousin, the British national Henri de Porada, to Lausanne in Switzerland, where she died, widowed for a second time in 1966 at the age of ninety-five. Palais Friess at Theresianumgasse 14 in Vienna's 4th district had been expropriated in 1941 and had been used together with the neighbouring Palais Rothschild as a barracks for SS officers. Palais Friess, which had been destroyed during an air raid, was restituted in 1949. Research conducted in 2008 as to the whereabouts of furniture and art works belonging to the family, which were to be stored in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien in 1944, revealed that they never arrived there and had already been restituted in 1947.