Emil Rosner born as the only child of the antiques dealer Leo (Markus Leib) Rosner and Jenni, née Feuer, in Vienna. After his return from captivity in the First World War, he lived from August 1920 at Rüdigergasse 12 in the 5th district. In 1932 he took over his father's business at Bräunerstraße 10 in the 1st district, which specialized in paintings and classical interior furnishings. Because of Rosner's Jewish origins, the business was closed on 10 November 1938 and deregistered on 24 April 1939. It was liquidated by Otto Faltis, who was appointed in February 1939 by the Vermögensverkehrsstelle (Property Transaction Office) as the general liquidator of at least sixty Viennese art and antiques dealerships. According to Hans Beer, who gave testimony in Rosner's application for victim compensation after the war, Rosner had worked with him for the lawyer Willy Perl's aid campaign, which organized ships' passages to Palestine for Viennese Jews. The Gestapo arrested Rosner in January 1939 along with other "leading employees" of Perl's "emigration office" and detained him for a month in the Vienna police prison on Elisabethpromenade. Rosner, who had a visa for Bolivia, left Austria escorted by the Gestapo on 24 October 1939 by train in the direction of Bratislava, from where continued on a Danube freighter, this time escorted by the Slovak Hlinka Guard, and then by the Hungarian, Yugoslavian and Romanian military. In early February 1940 he boarded the Zakarija, which after leaving the Dardanelles was captured by a British auxiliary cruiser and directed towards Palestine, where Rosner arrived on 12 February 1940. In Haifa he was interned in the British Atlith camp. After his release on 12 August 1940, he remained briefly in Tel Aviv and then worked as a labourer on a chicken farm in the Gedera agricultural colony. Rosner's mother Jenni, who had remained in Vienna, was deported on 13 August 1942 to Theresienstadt, where she perished a few weeks later. Emil Rosner returned to Europe in the 1950s at the latest, living above all in Rome but visiting Vienna repeatedly. Whereas his application for a victim ID was finally approved in 1962 after having been rejected five years earlier, and he also received compensation for his imprisonment on Elisabethpromenade, the loss of income and the internment in Atlith, for lack of evidence he was not compensated for the payment of the Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich Flight Tax) and Judenvermögensabgabe (Jewish Asset Levy), or for the liquidation of his business and seizure of his transport goods by the Oberster Kommissar (supreme commissar) in the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral. At around the same time in 1963, Emil Rosner applied for issuance of a presumption of death of the art collector Fritz Grünbaum, who perished in Dachau, and his wife Elisabeth Grünbaum, also murdered. Ten years before, in 1953, Rosner had already inquired with the American Joint Distribution Committee about their whereabouts. Asked by the Vienna Landesgericht für Zivilrechtsachen (provincial court for civil law matters) about his legal interest in the declaration regarding the Grünbaums, he merely stated: "I need the certificate of presumption for an inheritance claim in England by my cousin Friedrich Gruenbaum." The application was granted. However, there is no evidence that Emil Rosner was related to Fritz Grünbaum, and so Rosner's intentions and the supposed inheritance in Britain remain unclear. Rosner married twice and both marriages were childless. In 1975 he moved to Zurich, where he died six years later.