Reunited after 66 yrs

Published: April 6, 2006 | 3939th good news item since 2003

Two Jewish women here have been miraculously reunited with their cousin 66 years after all three survived the Holocaust.

Ella Friedvald, 82, and her sister Lila, 79, were sure that their cousin Krystyna had been killed in the Holocaust , but fate had other plans, locking them in a deep embrace after six decades at the Ben-Gurion airport yesterday, ‘The Jerusalem Post’ reported.

The reunion took place thanks largely to a faded postcard sent from a German labour camp and the determination of one of the survivors to claim her family’s life insurance benefits.

The three women were separated as teenagers when the Germans invaded Poland. After a tormenting war experience, Ella and Lila settled in Israel while Krystyna settled in the US, all having failed to find traces of their respective parents, the report said.

“I was positive they (Ella and Lila) were dead and they were sure I was killed with the rest of the Jews of Poland,” Krystyna told the daily.

While she was still at the labour camp, Krystyna had sent out postcards to various places in Poland in search of family members and friends, which were sent back to the camp with no addressee found.

Five years ago, her cousin Ella began to make inquiries about possible remuneration from the Generali company for life insurance taken out by her family members before the Second World War.

The Polish offices of the company did not find any policies for her parents or grandparents but did find one for her cousin’s father.

Ella then contacted a Polish organisation of authors and composers, where he had worked, to see if they had any record of him.

The organisation wrote back to say that their cousin had informed them in a letter in 1947 that her father had been killed five years earlier.

“At that moment we knew that she had survived the war,” she said.

Coincidentally, around the same time that Ella began to make inquiries, her cousin had answered an advertisement put out by the Polish Consulate in New York in search of survivors of the Warsaw uprising.

A representative of the consulate then visited Krystyna at her house where she gave him a postcard she had written from the German labour camp 60 years earlier that had been stamped ‘return to sender.’

The museum subsequently put it on its Internet site, which proved critical in reuniting her with her cousins.

Krystyna got a call from the Polish museum last month saying and found to her surprise that her cousins were looking for her.

“We were soon on the phone and we talked and we talked and we talked,” Krystyna said adding that within a week she was on a plane to Israel to reunite with her cousins.

Published in Life and Reunited
See also: timesofindia.indiatimes.com