Posted on 12/22/2003 7:42:57 AM PST by dead
A brother and sister who were split up as children in Poland and survived the Nazi Holocaust apart have been reunited in Israel after 65 years.
Shoshana November, 73, and Benny Shilon, 78, had lived in Israel since 1948 without knowing the other was alive.
Ms November said Saturday's reunion came about by chance after a friend pushed her to visit Jerusalem's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, last Friday.
She started looking through the archive for her husband's family when a member of staff came up with the news that her brother was still alive.
He had left his details just two weeks earlier in the museum's "Pages of Testimony".
"We jumped on one another and we hugged and kissed and it was hard to talk. It was hard to think," Mr November said.
Mr Shilon then found out that one of the photos in the museum was actually of Ms November. He had passed it many times without recognising the young girl staring through the wire fence at Auschwitz.
"I looked for her and my siblings during all the years after the war. In the end it happened like a Hannukah miracle," Mr Shilon said, referring to the eight-day Jewish holiday which began on Friday.
Mr Shilon and Ms November were split up in 1936, when their father left home. Their mother could not cope with four children and they went to separate orphanages. They met two years later for the last time before Saturday.
In 1942, Ms November was sent to Auschwitz. She said her life was saved by a woman who pushed her out of the line of those waiting to be gassed. Instead she ended up at a nearby work camp. Mr Shilon escaped to Russia and volunteered for the Red Army and was with the Russian troops when he took part in the operation to liberate Auschwitz. But by then his sister had been marched off by the Nazis with thousands of other prisoners.
She survived when the Nazis surrendered.
"You cannot describe this in words," Mr Shilon said.
"I grew up alone and I was immune to crying, I didn't know how to. But last night, I cried."
Reuters
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