Directly after Meinhof's disappearance one of her politically like-minded friends, Monika Berberich, collected Regine and Bettina from Berlin Zoo, a meeting point prearranged with another comrade who had collected the girls from their two-week break in Bremen. Berberich then drove with the children through France and Italy to a "barracks camp" on the side of Mount Etna which had originally been constructed as emergency accommodation for people made homeless by a volcanic eruption, and where now Andreas Baader and other comrades were hiding. The girls were told that they would be reunited with their mother in Sicily: they were not aware, at the time, that they had been taken there in order to avoid their being found by their father. In September 1970 the children were found by Stefan Aust, then a young investigative journalist from Hamburg, and returned to West Germany in time to spend their eighth birthday with their father. More recently Röhl herself has asserted with increasing conviction, in several interviews, that Meinhof would have had absolutely no reason to keep the girls away from their father at this time: there are hints that taking them to Sicily may have been part of a longer-term plan to escape with them to the relative safety (for a wanted terrorist suspect and her children) of a "Palestinian camp in Jordan". Röhl has also hinted strongly that the backwash from the bitterness of divorce had left her mother mentally damaged: "Ulrike Meinhof war eine wahnsinnig gekränkte Frau". Between 1970 and 1982 Regine and Bettina Röhl lived with their father in Hamburg where they underwent a relatively conventional upbringing, though not unmarked by the fate of her mother who was arrested in 1972 and spent the final four years of her life in prison awaiting the conclusion of a complex series of well publicised trials. In May 1976 Ulrike Meinhof's body was found hanged in her Stuttgart prison cell. At school, if she was asked about her parents, Röhl was able to respond with a well rehearsed one line explanation designed to conclude the discussion: "My mother's dead, and my father was the editor-in-chief of the left-wing magazine Konkret". In 1982 she graduated successfully from the prestigious Gymnasium Christianeum (secondary school) in Hamburg, and moved on to the local university where she studied History and Germanistics. Her university years also included a period studying Italian at Perugia.