Les Absentes (The Absent Ones)

The third part of the trilogy ventures into the worldwide search after the seven Jewish school girls from the grandmother’s class picture. Whatever her classmates, who hold regular reunions during the post-war period, missed to ask then and now, explores Catherine Bernstein decades after the photo has been taken: What has become of the Jewish women? Where are Mathilde Dornthal, Elsa Jankowiak and Elfriede Jankowiak, Elsbeth Kaufmann, Ilse Levy, Cilly Oppenheimer and Rosel Wallach? Catherine Bernstein's search begins at the Kassel City Museum and City Archive. Their staff help in the search for clues, deciphering migration lists, tax office lists and index cards. A worldwide search for “the absent ones” begins, leading her first to Johannesburg, where she meets Elsa and Elfriede Jankowiak, and then on to Tel Aviv, San Diego and London. However, not all managed to leave the country in time. The search for Cilly Oppenheimer ends at the extermination camp Sobibor. There the Nazis murdered the young woman at the age of 28. She was in the second of three deportation trains, which between 1941 and 1942 departed from Kassel central station, today’s rails 13 and 14, to the ghettos, concentration- and extermination camps set up by the Nazi regime.