An advertisement on Facebook touches many users: A woman is looking for her little sister. She hasn’t seen them in 60 years.
A woman born in Castrop-Rauxel shared a newspaper report from 1960 on Facebook that left many people stunned. “Bad news reached the traffic police on Saturday night,” it says. “A road accident with serious consequences left nine underage children without parents.”
A 40-year-old miner and his 36-year-old wife drove their motorcycle into the closed barrier of a level crossing “probably as a result of excessive speed”, were thrown onto the rails and hit by a passenger train. “The police and welfare came on Sunday and said mom and dad are dead,” Elke Bonhage told the “Ruhr Nachrichten”. She was one of nine children.
Two children come to the aunt, seven to the home
According to her, her uncle and aunt took care of the children that night. However, the aunt could not take care of everyone permanently and only took in the two oldest siblings, who were 12 and 15 years old at the time.
Elke Bonhage came to an orphanage with the six other siblings. Gradually, the children were later taken in by foster families.
Whip lashes in the foster family
Elke Bonhage also came into a family, but experienced a lot of suffering there. As she reports, she was beaten with a whip, among other things. She lost contact with all her siblings.
Decades later, however, she managed to track down seven of them again. She has only seen one sister since then, she reported to the “Ruhr Nachrichten”. It’s her younger sister Silke.
“I can’t deal with this”
Until the beginning of 1963, Elke and Silke were together in the children’s home. Elke went to school in the morning, while Silke, who was five at the time, stayed at the home. “I said to her, when I get home from school, we’ll play together,” Elke recalls. But one day Silke suddenly disappeared – without prior notice, she was placed in the care of foster parents.
As Elke Bonhage, who now lives in Dortmund, writes on Facebook, she has tried many ways to find her little sister again. Among other things, she also turned to Dieter Thomas Heck and Arabella Kiesbauer. The latter searched for missing people in a TV show at the beginning of the millennium. “But no chance as I don’t have a single photo of her.” The Castrop-Rauxel Youth Welfare Office could not help either.
If anyone knows the whereabouts of Silke, who was born on September 16, 1957 with the surname Booken, he can contact Elke Bonhage on Facebook. “I’ll be 70 in December,” she told the “Ruhr Nachrichten”. “I feel stupid, but I can’t deal with it.”
