In July 2021, The Unerasure Projekt’s founder, Terry Mandel, received an email through ancestry.com from Anna Eith, a 16-yo student at Königin-Luise-Schule (Queen Luise School) in Köln (Cologne), Germany, researching the life of a girl who’d attended her school until April 1938. Unbeknownst to Anna, her subject, Ingelore Silberbach, was Terry’s mother. Through their intergenerational, intercultural collaboration, Terry learned as much about her mother’s early life in Germany as Anna did about what happened in the 57 years after Ingelore and her family fled immediately after 9 November 1938, what many call ‘Kristallnacht’ and Germans refer to as ‘Reichpogromsnacht’. Anna’s subsequent essay about Terry’s mother and aunt was published in a 2023 book, Jüdische Schülerinnen und Schüler and Kölner Gymnasien, for which Terry was invited to write the Foreword to give voice to the many descendants of Jewish students from the Nazi era whose lives were researched by students learning research science and history from KLS Professor Dirk Erkelenz. The school also laid a Stolperstein (“stumbling stone”) honoring Terry’s mother in their courtyard, along with stones for other Jewish girls who’d studied there before the Third Reich forced Jewish students out of the public schools. KLS was the last high school in Köln to expel their Jewish girls.

Stolpersteine in KLS courtyard for former students, including the founder’s mother