Family reunited decades after mothers separated at Auschwitz

 

Dora on the left and Eva on the right 

Torn apart during the Holocaust, this family spent decades separated until they finally reunited recently, thanks to the internet. 

While at the concentration camp Auschwitz during World War II, the Nazis separated a woman named Dora and her 2-year-old daughter, Eva. The pair would spend the rest of their lives searching for each other, but would never see one another again. 

After the war, Dora moved to the US and had two more daughters. Unbeknownst to her, Eva had survived the atrocities of the Holocaust, and was brought to Israel, where she was adopted and later taken to Britain. 

Both women have since passed away, but Eva’s daughter, Clare Reay, was miraculously able to reunite herself with the two children Dora had in the US after her son bought her a MyHeritage DNA test. 

The test revealed that Reay’s great-grandmother had living children in Ohio. Immediately, she sought to meet her long-lost aunts.

The family’s 2021 reunion, over 75 years since the Nazis separated their mothers.

MyHeritage.com

“We always knew about Eva, but we didn’t know where to begin to find her,” Dena Morris, 73, one of Dora’s two US children, said of her long-lost aunt in a blog post by MyHeritage. “Now we have pictures, and she could be the twin of my mother. It’s insane because Reay’s mother looks identical to mum.”

In 2020, the families virtually reunited over 75 years since their respective mothers were separated in Poland (Reay was unable to come to the US due to COVID travel restrictions).

Then, this year, they finally reunited in person when Reay came to Louisville, Ohio, in a surprise visit to Morris and her sister Jean Gerhart, 75. 

“I’m hoping that they’re both in heaven, their souls together, and they know,” Morris said of their mothers’ reaction to the reunion. “It is just incredible.”