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ITN Source
JERUSALEM: Siblings reunite 65 years after the Holocaust
JERUSALEM: Siblings reunite 65 years after the Holocaust
For 65 years Simon Glasberg had thought his sister was one of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis in World War 2,(WW2) but a page of testimony revealed otherwise. 75-year-old Hilda Shlick had been living in Israel after escaping the horrors of WW2 and being separated from her family members whom she believed were killed by the Nazis. Shlick's Israeli grandchildren had tracked Glasberg down through the Internet, after coming across their grandmother's name in Yad Vashem's database of Holocaust victims in mid-June. The database at Jerusalem's Holocaust Memorial, launched in 2004, contains some 3 million names of Holocaust victims. 2 million of the names come from Pages of Testimony filled out by friends and relatives of victims, and the remainder are from archival lists. "After 65 years. And suddenly you find you open up the damn thing and everything, the whole thing is opens up and the happiness," said Simon Glasberg through his tears, as he met Hilda Shlick, who he had not seen for 65 years since their family split up in a bid to flee the Nazi Holocaust. The two were hosted on Monday (September 18) by Israel's Yad Vashem, a national museum in Jerusalem for the remembrance of six million Jews slain in World War II, just days after Glasberg, 81, flew in from Canada to meet a sister he was sure had died during the war. Besides finding each other, the brother and sister were also surprised to learn that two other brothers and a sister had survived the Holocaust, though one sister and a niece had apparently perished. "I'm happy to see you and I'm happy to embrace you, to be together. And now the whole thing after 65 years I found my sister that I loved and liked all the time," said Glasberg, a retired furrier, while meeting with Shlick, a former hairdresser at Yad Vashem's Hall of Names, whose walls are lined with black files listing the details of millions of Holocaust victims. "I am very happy to see you," Shlick said. While it is rare for sibling survivors to take so long to find each other, many other Holocaust survivors have taken years to locate relatives scattered around the globe since fleeing Nazi Europe. The Glasberg's split up in 1941 after the Nazis invaded their native Romania. Shlick fled their hometown, Chernowitz, with an older sister to the Soviet Union. Shlick later moved with a sister to Estonia, then a part of the Soviet Union, and in 1998, to Israel. Glasberg had remained in Romania during the war with three brothers and their parents. All survived a Nazi camp. They moved to Canada after a brief stay in Israel where Simon Glasberg and a brother fought in a 1948 Independence War. Glasberg never knew what happened to any of his sisters, and Shlick feared all her brothers and parents had perished. That was until last June, when her grandson, David Shlick, looked at the Yad Vashem database put online two years ago, and found her name -- listed erroneously as a war victim. It took him some weeks to track down the uncle in Canada who had made that entry. The uncle had since died. But two of his brothers, including Glasberg, were still alive, Shlick discovered, and his grandmother hadn't been aware. Plans for a reunion were partly delayed by Israel's month-long war with Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon that ended on August 14. One brother was too ill to make the trip, but Glasberg finally arrived last Friday (September 14). Their first meeting was in private. For Shlick the reunion contained two surprises, since she also learned through her brother that their parents had survived the war and lived into their 90s, but died about two decades ago. She said she now dreams of visiting their gravesites in Montreal.
ITN Source | September 23, 2006
