When Elana Milman was 6 years old, one of the children on the kibbutz where she lived let slip a secret. He said that one of the children in the children’s quarters had parents who were not their real parents. For days, Elana tried to get him to tell her who the adopted child was, and finally he admitted: “It’s you.”
Elana confronted her parents the next day. They took her to her favorite spot on the kibbutz, under a mulberry tree, and told her that it was true: they were not her birth parents, but they were the ones who raised her and loved her.
Elana as a toddler with her adoptive parents
This answer satisfied her at the time, but as she grew older, she developed more and more curiosity about her birth parents. She pressed her parents for information, but it was only when she was 29 and pregnant with her third child that her adoptive mother finally gave her the first nugget of information: her mother’s name was Franziska Lewinska, and Elana was born in Germany.
In 1978, Elana’s husband Dov traveled to Germany for work and seized the opportunity to discuss Elana’s case with a German lawyer, who offered to help. He was able to locate Elana’s original birth certificate, which said that Elana was born Helena Lewinska to a Polish-Jewish woman, indeed named Franziska Lewinska, at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp in 1947. It also listed her father’s name as Eugeniusz Lewinski.
Elana’s birth mother as a young woman
After meticulous research, Elana was able to track down her birth mother, who had married and changed her name, in Canada. She went to visit and even to live there with her family for a year, and Elana was able to develop a close relationship with her birth mother — then called Franka — before her death in the 1980s. Franka shared with Elana that she had survived the Holocaust by escaping the Warsaw Ghetto and assuming a false identity. But she refused to tell Elana who her father was, and every search Elana tried based on the name on her birth certificate hit a dead end.
Elana (right) with her birth mother Franka and Franka’s husband and two children in 1981
“Every time I quizzed my mother — like, what happened to her during the war and who was my father — she gave me different stories,” she told CNN in a recent interview. “When I bugged her too much, she said, ‘The only thing I can tell you is that he was a very good singer and dancer — and very handsome.’”
Elana accepted that she would probably never know who her father was. She wrote an autobiography — later adapted into a historical novel in English called The Secrets My Mother Kept — and after publishing it, she was interviewed in an Israeli magazine. MyHeritage Founder and CEO Gilad Japhet happened to read the article, and he forwarded it to our Research team asking if there was anything we could do to help.
In search of the mysterious father
So began an arduous research process that took 6 months. The first surprise was when Elana took a MyHeritage DNA test and her ethnicity results indicated that she was only around 50% Ashkenazi Jewish — and 50% East European. This showed that her father probably hadn’t been a fellow Jewish Holocaust survivor, as Elana had always assumed.
The next step forward came through a 2.3% DNA Match with a woman named Ola, who seemed to be on the father’s side. The percentage of shared DNA indicated that Elana and Ola were related through great-grandparents.
cM Explainer
relationship probability chart for Elana’s DNA Match with Ola
The Research team then expanded upon Ola’s small tree, locating records to support their findings. They mapped out all 8 possible sets of great-grandparents and their descendants, and identified all male relatives who might fit the profile of Elana’s birth father.
Eventually, they were able to narrow down the candidates to 6 men of the right age, generation, and location. They created a detailed timeline for each of them. After months of painstaking detective work — which Roi Mandel, our Director of Research, describes as “the most complicated research we ever did” — one man stood out as being the most likely candidate: Eugeniusz Gorzkoś, who was born in 1921 and died in 1966.
Eugeniusz Gorzkoś
Eugeniusz fought with the Polish resistance during the war, and was captured and transferred to Germany before the war ended. During the critical period when Elana was conceived, he was based in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart.
Eugeniusz’s identity card as a displaced person
‘Nothing in my deepest dreams could have prepared me’
The next step was tracking down his descendants. The team found Eugeniusz’s two children, Juliusz and Ewa, in another tree on MyHeritage, and reached out to the site manager, who was able to provide more information, including contact information. Juliusz agreed to take a DNA test, and when he did, the relationship was confirmed: Juliusz is Elana’s half-brother.
Juliusz told CNN that “nothing in my deepest dreams” could have prepared him for discovering that he had another sister. “I was thinking that I was already reaching the end of my days,” he said, but the connection made him feel that he was “born a few months ago.”
Juliusz doesn’t remember much about Eugeniusz, as his parents separated when he was very young. He says that his father was too young to enlist in the Polish resistance when the war broke out, but joined in 1940. He was arrested by the Germans 3 years later for distributing resistance leaflets, and was imprisoned in Warsaw for several months. According to Juliusz, Eugeniusz was injured during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and was sent to a POW camp in Germany. That might be where he met Elana’s mother. Elana accepts that she might never know exactly what happened between her biological parents.
“Right now that doesn’t matter to me in comparison with when I wrote the book and thought this was the most important thing. Not anymore,” Elana told CNN.
Our team arranged a virtual meeting between the siblings. Watch their first conversation below:
Elana told her brother that learning her identity has been the “project of my life.” When Juliusz mentioned that their father was a virtuoso violinist and a singer, Elana burst into tears, saying: “He was a violinist? Oh dear God, I played violin as well. Ten years! I was playing in an orchestra and also a singer, a soloist.”
The siblings meet for the first time
In May, Elana traveled to Poland to meet Juliusz in person. He and one of his sons greeted Elana and her granddaughter with flowers and hugs. “I immediately felt that blood is not water,” she told CNN.
Elana and her granddaughter stayed with Juliusz in his home in Blizno, not far from Warsaw. Juliusz doesn’t speak English or Hebrew and Elana doesn’t speak Polish, but Juliusz’s son helped with translation.
“After a few hours it didn’t feel like we didn’t know each other,” Juliusz told CNN. “We felt almost as if we had known each other for a long time.”
Elana and Juliusz visit their father’s grave together
Elana also met her half-sister Ewa. “They prepared an album for me, of my father with his family,” she told CNN. Both she and her family noticed remarkable resemblance between the newfound relatives.
Elana looks at family photos with Juliusz’s wife Ania
When she traveled to Warsaw with her granddaughter and nephew, there was a moment that gave Elana “shivers”: on one side of the street, they saw a memorial plaque commemorating the wall that separated the Jewish ghetto from the rest of the city. Nearby was a sign memorializing fighters from the Polish resistance who were shot by German forces during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Elana described it as a “defining moment”: “I am a descendant of a Polish-Jewish mother — a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto — and a Polish-Catholic father, a former Armia Krajowa fighter who was injured and captured on the first day of the Polish uprising on August 1, 1944,” she told CNN. “I finally closed the circle of my belonging — both paternal and maternal.”
Left to right: Juliusz, Elana, Ewa, Ewa’s husband Wladek (kneeling), Juliusz’s wife Ania, Elana’s granddaughter Yahli and Juliusz’s sons Radek and Hubert
Many thanks to Elana and Juliusz for allowing us to be part of their story; to our Founder and CEO, Gilad Japhet, for identifying this opportunity to help change someone’s life; to our Research team, Roi Mandel, Elisabeth Zetland, and Naama Lanski, for their many months of painstaking research; to Jacob Levine from our Support team who helped with translation; and to everyone else who contributed to the success of this research project and reunion. We wish this wonderful family many happy years together.
If you have a significant, life-altering family mystery like Elana’s that you’ve struggled to solve — maybe we can help. Reach out to us via this form or at stories@myheritage.com.
The post Bergen-Belsen Adoptee Finally Identifies Her Father & Gains New Family Thanks to MyHeritage appeared first on MyHeritage Blog.
Source: My Heritage
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