[1][2][3] Edith Barakovich was born in Semlin (known, following subsequent population shifts, by its Serbian name as Zemun), at that time a mid-sized multi-ethnic town just outside Belgrade.
Barakovich opened ""Atelier de Moda"", a small studio in the Friedrichstraße in the heart of city, from where she worked as a fashion photographer.
[4] Business was good until that morning during the first part of 1933 when they arrived to find a large stone in the middle of the floor and the shop window shattered.
[4] After the National Socialists took power at the start of 1933 there was no longer any work for them in Germany, apparently for reasons of race, and they returned home to Vienna.
Work permits were hard to obtain, and the couple had no income apart from the small amount received in royalties from Paul Frank's film-scripts and novels.
For Frank and Edith it was time to quit the country: on 13 June they had joined the hundreds of thousands of Parisians fleeing south.
They were accompanied by Paul Frank's mistress and muse, the photographer Lilly Joseph (1911 – 2006),[a] who had been with them since at least as far back as their time in Berlin.
She took to following the packs of dogs out of town to the dunes where they congregated in the evenings, and photographing some of the individual animals, though she knew very well that she would never find anyone to buy the pictures.
A friendly local who guided her to the largest of the dunes in the area explained that the packs of dogs had appeared during the Spanish Civil War when they had been able to feast on the bodies of dead escapees from Spain who had attempted to swim across from Tarifa or Algeciras, but drowned.