Siblings Separated by Holocaust Reunited 65 Years Later

Henia and Benzion Glasberg and their seven children were living in Chernowitz, Russia, when the Nazis invaded and ripped their family apart. Their daughter Hilda, who was 10 years old, escaped to Uzbekistan with her older sister Bertha. Her parents and her brothers Simon, Mark, Karol, and Eddie fled to Romania where they found refuge in a basement while they waited for the war to end so they could rebuild their lives. One daughter, Pepi, was lost to her family and was most likely killed by the Nazis.

After the war ended, the Glasbergs and their sons immigrated to Canada. As for Hilda and Bertha, they made their way to Estonia, and Bertha died in 1970. In 1998, Shlick immigrated to Israel. A few months ago Hilda’s family was having a conversation and two of her grandchildren, Benny and David, learned that her maiden name was Glasberg. They had been intrigued by her stories of the Holocaust for most of their lives, so they began to investigate her past.

To the surprise of Hilda Shlick, her grandsons were able to use the database of Holocaust victims at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial to unearth a mystery spanning six decades and three continents. The men, both in their 20s, discovered that the database contained an entry stating that their grandmother had died over 50 years earlier.

The page of testimony they found had been submitted in 1999 by Hilda’s brother Karol, of Montreal, who had written about his sister Hilda who had "perished in the Shoah." That surprising entry led them to discover surviving relatives that Hilda knew nothing about. Karol died later that year, but Hilda’s grandsons continued searching through the website of the Montreal Burial Society and several online forums used by survivors of Chernowitz, and eventually Schlick’s grandsons tracked down Karol’s son, who gave them the missing pieces of what had happened to their grandmother’s family through the decades.

Last Friday Simon Glasberg saw his gray-haired little sister for the first time in over half a century. "I felt I couldn’t talk," he told reporters afterward. "I just cried. You don’t understand…65 years." Shlick was also overwhelmed by the reunion. "For 65 years I lived thinking I had no family besides one sister," she said.

Although the recent improvements in technology have made it easier for family members to track Holocaust survivors, as each year passes there are fewer and fewer survivors left. Avner Shaley, the director of Yad Vashem, said that the story of Hilda Shlick should encourage all Jews around the world to do their own investigations into the database for names of their relatives, and to submit their own testimonies about those who have been lost, to aid others in their searches for answers. The database went online in 2004, and since then it has been visited by over 10 million people and has grown to contain nearly 3 million names of Holocaust victims.

The last remaining Glasberg sibling, Mark, lives in Ottawa but was too ill to travel to Israel to meet his sister. Hilda plans to travel to Canada soon to meet him and other relatives, and to visit the graves of her parents. In the meantime, the newly extended family will share the Jewish New Year together this weekend and do a little more catching up. "After 65 years, I have found the sister who I love," Simon Glasberg said, his eyes full of tears. "I can’t stop kissing her."