Surviving Siblings Reunited!

Good news of the day from Yahoo.com.

Yahoo has a great story up about a brother and sister separated during the Holocaust and recently reunited. Hilda Shlick’s grandsons used the Internet to locate her long lost, 81-year old brother, Simon Glasberg.

While searching the database of Holocaust victims at Yad Vashem (the Israeli Holocaust memorial) her two grandsons found that the list was in error, reporting that their grandmother had died over 50 years ago. By cross checking the database with her maiden name, Glasberg, the two industrious twenty-something grandsons found family living in Ottawa, Canada.

According to the report on the Yahoo website, written by Aron Heller of the Associated Press:

When Glasberg, who lives near Ottawa, Canada, saw his gray-haired little sister for the first time, 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, 75, said she too was overwhelmed by the discovery.

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

They last saw each other in 1941, when the Nazis invaded Romania and split the family up. At the time, Hilda was 10-years old. She escaped to Uzbekistan with her older sister. The rest of the family, parents, Simon and three other brothers found refuge in a basement in Romania.

Simon Glasberg then emigrated to Canada after the war and Hilda eventually went to Israel in 1998 after living in Estonia.

While most of the other family dies (the Glasberg parents lived well into their 90s and died in the Nineteen Eighties, the surviving siblings are Simon, Hilda and Mark.

They will be spending the Rosh Hashanah holiday together in Israel where Simon and other siblings went to reunite with Hilda.

Simon said mentioned that his parents always wanted to reunite all their children.

"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."

This is the second reunion of siblings lost during the Holocaust who found each other through the Yad Vashem database. Recently sisters were reunited after being apart for 61 years.

Happy News for the Jewish New Year.

L.S.C.

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