Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, the Morgensterns were expropriated and deported as Jews to the occupied Poland, where they were imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto. There Samuel Morgenstern died of wasting in August 1943. He was buried in the ghetto cemetery. His wife, Emma, who, as her brother-in-law Wilhelm Abeles (who also lived in the ghetto and survived Auschwitz) witnessed her husband's death, was most likely deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp at the same month. Since it was a standard practice in Auschwitz to send most newcomers, especially old women unable to work, directly to the gas chambers, their death can be considered certain. Accordingly, a Viennese court ruled in December 1946 that they could not have survived to the end of the war and pronounced them dead, in agreement with a motion filed by their brother Max Pragan.