Woman who thought family was killed in the Holocaust meets relatives she didn’t know existed

When Adriana Turk’s brother died last year, she thought she was left alone in the world, as she thought the rest of her family had been killed in the Holocaust. But at the age of 74, she decided to do a DNA test to find out more about her heritage . What she found has changed her life; an entire family tree including dozens of distant cousins, relatives and their children, spread across the world.

In the last week she reunited with one of them: Raanan Gidron, 73, a psychotherapist living in Israel. Adriana and Raanan spoke to The Independent shortly after their discovery in January this year. Now, speaking from a cafe in Tel Aviv, they talked about how it felt to see each other in person for the first time.

My father never told me who I was. I’ve got two cousins on my mother’s side who don’t speak to each other. That leaves a pretty empty space.” Born to a German Jewish father who fled Nazi Germany in 1937, she knew that her grandmother had died in the Warsaw Ghetto while her aunt, uncle and their two young children were killed in Auschwitz.

She says her father rarely spoke about them, preferring to avoid the topic altogether. She discovered the descendants of three Holocaust survivors from her grandmother’s family line through MyHeritage DNA. I’m getting to know these people, cousins and second cousins,” she says.

From being all alone to having all of these people in my life.” Despite Raanan being connected to many of the family members across Germany and Israel, he had never connected with his cousins in Australia although he knew that they existed. When relatives had previously reached out to Adriana’s father, he had rejected their advances. She has the same features as us, as well as the slight look in their eye.

You’re familiar with the love that is there.” Raanan has spent days taking Adriana around the homes of family members and the pair have spent hours working out the nitty gritty of their family tree. They believe this technical work is a gift for future generations. These have included some difficult discoveries too, including a relative who they believed was alive but later discovered that she had not survived.