Separated By War

From the WP:

"Two brothers were separated by the Holocaust. After 77 years, their families just reunited."

The five women crowded together around the kitchen table in New Jersey, their eyes fixed on a laptop screen. It was 7 a.m., and none of them had slept well the night before; they were too anxious and excited for this moment. Jess Katz logged into Skype as her mother and three sisters watched. A face flickered into view: their cousin, the son of a long-missing uncle, the family they thought they had lost forever in the Holocaust. On the other side of the screen, on the other side of the world, Evgeny Belzhitsky sat with his daughter, his granddaughter and a translator in his home on Sakhalin Island, Russia. The eight family members smiled at each other, speechless. Then, Katz recalls, they all started to cry. “What do you say to someone you’ve been searching for your whole life?” Katz says. More than 70 years had passed since Katz’s grandfather, Abram Belz, first tried to find his younger brother, Chaim. Abram last saw Chaim in 1939, the year their family was relocated along with thousands of other Polish Jews to the Piotrków Trybunalski ghetto at the start of World War II.

The brothers died without seeing each other again, but on April 20 their families had been joyfully reunited.  The young men were separated soon after the family was forced into the ghetto following the Nazi invasion of Poland.  Abram’s mother had begged her two sons to escape and save themselves, Katz says. “My grandfather, because he was the oldest son, felt an obligation to stay,” she says. “But it was important to their mom that Chaim try to escape.” With his mother’s help, Chaim slipped through a gap in the ghetto wall and fled across the border to the Soviet Union. The family knew he made it there, Katz says, because he sent letters and packages to his family. But then the letters and packages stopped coming.  Abram described what happened next in a 1990 testimonial for Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation project: Less than a year after we moved into the ghetto, my grandfather dropped dead in the house. Two weeks later, my 24-year-old sister died of tuberculosis. My uncle who was 26 years old was shot, his wife and baby were sent to Treblinka where they were gassed to death by the Nazis. The rest of my family was exterminated. My parents were sent to Treblinka and were killed in the gas chambers. Of more than 60 relatives, Abram and one of his cousins were the lone survivors of the concentration camps. Abram was liberated from the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1945, and eventually resettled in Brooklyn, NY. He never stopped looking for Chaim. When Abram moved to the U.S. after the war, he wrote to the Polish government and sought the help of nonprofits that worked to connect survivors to their families. In the 1980’s, his daughter — Katz’s mother, Michelle Belz Katz — penned letters to the Red Cross, Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center), and Russian and Polish officials, to no avail. Last month, Katz — a tech-savvy 25-year-old who works for a software company in New York City and has blogged about her family’s Jewish roots — had extra time on her hands as she recovered from minor surgery at home. She decided to take up the search. After decades of tedious research and letter-writing, it took Katz two weeks to find Chaim’s son. With the help of a Jewish heritage website, JewishGen.org, Katz contacted a genealogist who quickly tracked down Russian military documents with Chaim’s name and army unit, dated 1942. Katz shared the documents in a Jewish Facebook group, where she was directed to another Russian forum, where — with the help of Google Translate — Katz’s post caught the attention of an Israeli woman who matched Chaim’s last name to a man on a Russian social networking site called Classmates. That man, it turned out, was Evgeny Belzhitsky. On different continents, the lives of the two brothers followed remarkably similar paths: both became successful tailors after the war. Both married women eight years younger. Both were gentle, doting fathers. And each had searched for the other, writing letter after letter, hoping his sibling had somehow survived.  Neither lived to see last month’s reunion. Abram died five years ago at age 95; Chaim succumbed to a brain tumor at 51. Belzhitsky showed his American relatives a photograph of his father’s grave.

^ This is one of the stories that started out sad (the brothers lost during the war) and ended sad (the brothers were both dead before their families were reunited. It shows that World War 2 not only disrupted families and lives back in the 1940s, but continues to do so today. That is why people still place blame on Germany and Japan for starting the war and think both countries and their collaborators need to do more to atone for the horrors they did. ^

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/05/02/two-brothers-were-separated-by-the-holocaust-after-77-years-their-families-just-reunited/