Canadian man reunited with sister, 65 years after separation during Holocaust

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This article was published 18/09/2006 (7301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

JERUSALEM (AP) – With tears filling his eyes, Simon Glasberg hugged Hilda Shlick. “I can’t stop kissing her,” the 81-year-old said in heavily accented English. “After 65 years, I have found the sister who I love.”

Until a month ago, Shlick was convinced she had lost nearly her entire family in the Holocaust. But two internet-savvy grandsons uncovered a tragic tale of a different sort, one of a family torn apart by war and genocide. They reunited the two siblings, each of whom thought the other was dead.

Improved technology in recent years has made the task of tracking down Holocaust survivors easier, but as each year passes fewer and fewer remain.

Using the database of Holocaust victim’s at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, two of Shlick’s grandchildren, Benny and David, began unearthing a mystery spanning six decades and three continents.

Scanning the database, the pair discovered an entry erroneously stating that their grandmother had perished half a century earlier. That entry, posted by another of her brothers, led them to other surviving relatives, who eventually brought about the siblings’ emotional reunion.

When Glasberg, who lives near Ottawa, saw his grey-haired little sister, he recognized her immediately, he said.

“I felt I couldn’t talk. I just cried,” he said. “You don’t understand, 65 years . . .,” his voice trailed off.

Shlick, speaking Russian that was interpreted by a translator, said she too was overwhelmed by the discovery.

“For 65 years, I lived thinking I had no family besides one sister,” she said.

Since last Friday’s reunion, the family bond has clearly been re-established, with the two elderly siblings playfully joking and reminiscing about old stories in a hearty mixture of Russian and Yiddish. Their large families have quickly become close.

The last time the two saw each other was in’41, when the Glasberg family of Chernowitz, Romania, was separated after the Nazis invaded. Hilda Shlick, then 10, escaped to Uzbekistan with her older sister Bertha. The rest of the family – parents Henia and Benzion, and brothers Simon, Mark, Karol and Eddie – stayed in Romania, finding refuge in a basement. Only the fate of one sister, Pepi, remains unknown. She disappeared and is presumed to have been killed by the Nazis.

Simon Glasberg, along with his brother Mark, fled here, fighting in Israel’s war of independence, before joining their parents and their two brothers in Canada. Shlick and her sister moved to Estonia, where Bertha died in’70.

Shlick, 75, immigrated to Israel in’98. During a family conversation this summer, her grandsons learned that her maiden name was Glasberg, and they began to investigate her past.

They logged onto the Yad Vashem website and found a page of testimony submitted in’99 by her brother Karol, of Montreal, who wrote about his sister Hilda, who “perished in the Shoah.”

Karol died the same year, but further searches through the website of the Montreal Burial Society and online forums of survivors of Chernowitz, Shlick’s grandsons were able to track down his son, who filled in the picture of what happened to the divided family.

Shlick’s parents passed away in the’80s in Montreal, having lived well into their 90s, as did her brother Eddie in 2004.

Mark Glasberg lives in Ottawa, but was too ill to travel to Israel to meet his sister. His son Irving, though, lives in Israel, just half an hour away from his missing relatives.

The new extended family will share the Jewish New Year together this weekend, catching up on half a century of history.

Shlick said she plans to travel to Canada soon to see her other relatives and visit the graves of the parents she lost as a child.

Yad Vashem director Avner Shalev said the story should encourage Jews from all around the world to check the database for their relatives’ names and to submit pages of testimony for those who have been lost.

The database contains some three million names of Holocaust victims and has been visited by 10 million people since it went online in 2004.

Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari said this was only the second known case of living siblings discovering each other through the database. Last June, two sisters who had survived the Holocaust and moved separately to Israel were reunited after 61 years.

Glasberg, though thrilled to find his sister, said the reunion had a bittersweet feeling because of all the years the family was divided.

“My poor parents, they always said, ‘We wish we would find all our kids’ ” he said. “It is such a tragedy, but now I am so happy.”

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On the Net:

www.yadvashem.org