The most astonishing people are in your back yard

Edith Reiss approaches life with a simple statement: “I look at the world with curiosity,” she says.

And you quickly learn this is true. Since her birth in England 93 years ago, Mrs. Reiss has been around the world and witnessed pivotal moments of the 20th century.

A Gables resident for 62 years, she has seen it evolve from a small, quiet town into an international hub.

“When I came to Coral Gables,” she says, “there were two movie houses and no Miracle Mile.”

That was in 1946, when Mrs. Reiss came to America on the Queen Mary as the “war bride” of Dr. Jake Reiss. He was on a team of doctors who established a veterans’ hospital in the Biltmore Hotel and went on to be part of the University of Miami School of Medicine. Today, Edith Reiss lives just blocks away from the Biltmore in the house she shared with her husband and raised her family.

Though legally blind, her insight is as sharp as ever.

“Foreign places have always interested me,” says Mrs. Reiss, adding that as a student of the German language, she visited Germany several times and saw Hitler speak there on Aug. 29, 1939, just two days before Germany invaded Poland and began World War II.

A few months later, inspired to contribute to the war mobilization effort, Mrs. Reiss became a nurse. With her language skills (she also had studied French), sensitive nature and sharp mind, she quickly distinguished herself and from 1940 to 1945 received four medals for outstanding service.

Her first post was in a London military hospital, which sustained direct hits from German bombs that killed 87 people. In one air raid, part of the hospital collapsed on her, and she was pulled from the rubble. Mrs. Reiss also worked for a year in the Hampstead district of London at an anti-aircraft site that saw air raids night and day; food and clothing were heavily rationed.

In 1943, Mrs. Reiss was a welfare officer on a hospital ship in the Mediterranean, treating soldiers and sailors rescued from torpedoed ships. She was then transferred to a British military hospital in Rome that housed 300 Allied patients and 200 German prisoners of war and was first to meet Allied servicemen released from Austrian prisons in March 1945.

On May 11, 1945, two days after Germany surrendered, Mrs. Reiss accompanied British Red Cross and government officials as a witness of Nazi crimes uncovered at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

“It was a horrible nightmare,” Mrs. Reiss says. “There were piles of bodies everywhere, and the people who were alive were dreadfully emaciated. It was shocking.”

Mrs. Reiss’ memories were recorded by Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg in a testimony for his organization, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation; her stories are granting younger generations a personal connection to history. In Spielberg’s words, “Far into the future, people will be able to see a face, hear a voice, and observe a life, so that they may listen, and learn and always remember.”

As busy as was her youth, Mrs. Reiss hardly slowed down later. In 1974, she earned a master’s degree in gerontology from the University of Miami, and she has traveled extensively as part of her research on aging in different cultures.

In addition, she has written 45 short stories and is working on her first novel.

An avid walker (she does three miles every morning), Mrs. Reiss is active in several organizations. Among them is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and the UM Women’s Club. She is a founding member of the Medical Faculty Association, and she still audits courses at UM.

Yet there’s no other Coral Gables, not even a desire to find one, after traveling the wide world over.

Explains Mrs. Reiss, smiling: “It’s home.”