An adopted Montrealer still hopes to find her sister, who disappeared nearly 70 years ago in Quebec, thanks to artificial intelligence and new genetic banks.
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Photo of the children of Oskar and Hilda Doederlein from left to right: older sister Hilde, Rosemarie (~2 years old), older brother Günter, and Vera.
“I remember one evening when I put my head in my mother’s lap. I cried, cried, cried. I asked her several times: where is she?” painfully recalls Vera Doederlein Hastie, now 79 years old.
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The ship’s “manifesto” from September 1954, when our family came to Canada from Germany.
It was in 1954 that his family left Germany by boat to settle in the city of Côte-Saint-Luc in Montreal. A few weeks after their arrival, his sister Rosemarie went to buy bread in their neighborhood for her parents.
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Vera, 11, and Rosemarie, 13, in 1954 in Germany just before leaving for Canada.
During this day in September, the 14-year-old never returned from the bakery.
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The place in Montreal where Rosemarie and Vera lived when they were young.
Kidnapped by a taxi?
“Every night we walked around the neighborhood to find her, but I didn’t know she was missing. My parents didn’t tell me about it to protect me. I found out several years later. My father even went to the incinerator in town in the hope of finding a piece of clothing from her,” the Log Vera Doederlein Hastie.
This former Montrealer, who left Quebec in 1963 to live in Coronado in the United States, remembers very well a significant conversation between her parents.
“They were saying that the police and detectives believed that Rosemarie had been kidnapped by a network of taxi drivers who assaulted people in the Côte-des-Neiges borough in the 1950s,” explains Ms.me Doederlein Hastie, who was 11 at the time of the tragedy.
However, she specifies that several hypotheses are on the table to explain the disappearance of her eldest. She could have been converted to the nuns, adopted on the black market or even bought by a farmer to work on his land.
new hope
Along with her daughter Christa, Vera Doederlein Hastie recently asked the public for help on social media to solve the enigma that has surrounded her sister for 68 years.
“People have been so generous with us. We receive thousands of messages, especially from experts. They want to help us, even if it doesn’t concern them. I find it so touching, “says the sixty-something with emotion.
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An artistic portrait of Rosemarie made by combining the few photos Vera had of her when she was 13 and 2 years old to create the 14 year old portrait.
An artist in Poland drew a color portrait of the girl when she disappeared in 1954. Another used artificial intelligence to create a portrait of what Rosemarie would look like at the age of 81.
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Age progression of what Rosemarie would look like today at age 81, by forensic artist Samantha Steinberg.
never forgotten
Mme Doederlein Hastie also sent his DNA to gene banks Ancestry.com and 23andme to find her big sister.
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One of her three items that Vera has kept for the past 68 years, hoping her sister will knock on her door one day and she can return them.
“I have been keeping her purse, her prayer book and her jewelry since 1954 for when she comes knocking at my house. […] I am almost 80 years old. It’s kind of my last chance to find out what happened. I would just like to know where Rosemarie is,” she concludes.