Elsa Berliner, née Knöpfelmacher (often also spelled Knöpflmacher), lived in Bad Kissingen for only a short time and worked as a kindergarten teacher at the Israelite Children's Sanatorium.

She was born in Vienna in December 1899, the daughter of Leopold and Betty Knöpfelmacher. Her father was born in Vienna and had married Betty Heinsheimer from Mannheim in February 1899. Elsa's brother Walter Adolf was born in 1901.

Little is known about the rest of the family's life. Elsa's mother died in Vienna in 1931. It is possible that Elsa, who was a kindergarten teacher by profession, lived in Antwerp for a while, as a 1933 immigration register from the police there shows. She later lived in Berlin, where she married Adolf (Albert) Berliner from Jauer in Lower Silesia in July 1935. He was 26 years older than her and had three grown-up children from his first marriage.

Elsa Berliner moved to Bad Kissingen in August 1938 and worked as a kindergarten teacher at the Israelite Children's Sanatorium. This was the last spa season in which the Jewish spa facility was still open. In October, Elsa Berliner reported back to Berlin.

Elsa and her husband only managed to escape from Berlin after the start of the war. They reached New York via Antwerp on the ship "Westerland" in February 1940. According to the 1950 US Census, Else Berliner and her husband lived in East Orange, New Jersey, where she died in April 1978 at the age of 78. Her husband Adolf (Albert) had died in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1964 (information from a family tree on familysearch, but without proof).

Elsa's brother Walter had already emigrated to the United States in March 1935. Her widowed father Leo(pold) lived in Ilvesheim (Rhine-Neckar district) and Mannheim during the Nazi era. He was deported from there to Gurs (in the southwest of France) in October 1940 and murdered on December 2, 1941. The information on the place of death varies: the memorial book of the Federal Archives in Koblenz mentions Perpignan (internment camp) and the Yad Vashem central database mentions the Vernet camp, around 50 km away.