While she and her immediate family escaped from Bamberg, Germany, her grandparents did not. Rossmer was invited to return to Germany at the end of 1991 to install a sculptural ensemble that recalled her own family's emigration from Germany and the horrors of her grandparents' deportation and extermination. Rossmer's installation uses artifacts that the viewer can feel, touch and read. Ghost-like apparitions appear amid the documents and family photographs. There are many objects, but the lost object is the one most dear that cannot be retrieved.
Objects appear in a sense only as ghosts moving throughout the environment, alongside the viewer.
Rossmer's individual loss becomes a tragic episode through the power of the installation, but also a metaphor for all displacement and similar suffering. Rossmer was born in Bamberg, Germany. By 1933 the thriving Jewish community of one thousand people dwindled to a few elderly souls. During the previous decade, only ten Jewish children were born in the city, Gabrielle being one of them. The morning after Kristallnacht , along with all Jewish males under the age of sixty-five, Rossmer's father was arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp.