The attic of the family inn near Braunau am Inn in Upper Austria had always been off limits to Katharina Mayrhofer. “It was forbidden,” explains the 38-year-old artist. “My mother wasn’t allowed to go in there either, even as an adult.” But in the late 2000s, while looking to renovate her student accommodation, Mayrhofer asked her grandfather, Josef Kaltenhauser, who owned the inn, if she could check the furniture she had heard was stashed upstairs.

To her surprise, Kaltenhauser agreed. “He liked the idea that I restored old things,” says Mayrhofer, then a student of classical sculpture. What she discovered in that attic would lead to a restoration – but also to uncovering dark family secrets as well as forming new life-long friendships. Her discovery has also now become the focus of

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