ADa and Lucie brought a bouquet of flowers, red roses. And they’re excited too. In a few minutes you will meet Sophie Ullin, a woman from Melbourne, Australia, who works as an art consultant. It’s been almost half a year since you sent Ullin a message via the social network Instagram. When she didn’t answer, they didn’t give up, but kept looking and tracked down an email address from Ullin. The Australian responded to the second message.

Since then, the three of them – the Frankfurt tenth graders Ada Kremer and Lucie Sameith and the Australian art consultant Sophie Ullin – have been in exchange, writing to each other, sending questions and answers back and forth. Well, on a warm Friday afternoon in early May, they meet in person for the first time.

What connects the three is the Australian’s grandmother: Elinor Ullin, born on February 24, 1905 in Frankfurt, maiden name Wertheim, known as Lorli. Her father was a well-known and successful businessman dealing in grain. From 1919 to 1922 his daughter attended the Schiller School in Frankfurt’s Sachsenhausen district, just a few steps from the banks of the Main, which was then an all-girls school.

The Kulturfonds Rhein-Main supports the project

13 years later she had to flee because she was Jewish. In 1935 she left for Milan, seeking protection from the repression of the Nazi regime. In 1938 she moved on. She actually wanted to go into exile in the United States together with her husband Heinrich. But because a ship bound for Australia left a few days earlier, they ended up in Melbourne. This is how Elinor Ullin survived the Holocaust. Her older sisters weren’t so lucky. Both were murdered.

Ada and Lucie have delved into the biography of Elinor Ullin – in school lessons, in a workshop entitled “Against forgetting”, in compulsory elective lessons, abbreviated WPU. There, the 15-year-old students tried to find out as much as possible about Elinor Ullin, who went to the school they attend today a hundred years ago. To do this, they researched the Internet, looked through old phone books, delved into shipping data and digital archives. And that’s when they came across Sophie Ullin, Elinor’s granddaughter.

With figures and stick figures

The course, in which Ada, Lucie and a good dozen other tenth graders deal with the stories of persecuted Schiller students, was recorded by an artist, the draftswoman Leonore Poth. You will get the youngsters not only to deal with the biographies of the students, but also to deal with them artistically. She has teamed up with the theater director Liora Hilb. The Kulturfonds Rhein-Main supports the project.