Following a decades-long journey to piece together the puzzle of her past, a retired Toronto teacher has discovered answers and made connections with relatives she never knew existed.
Elana Milman was six years old and living on a kibbutz in northern Israel when she learned she had been adopted as an infant from a displaced persons camp in Bergen-Belsen, Germany.
It was around 30 years later that she found out the identity of her birth mother, Holocaust survivor Franziska Lewinska.
“My mother was a survivor from Ghetto Warsaw, and she managed to hide herself with a fake ID for the rest of the the war,” Milman said.
Milman managed to track her down in Montreal, where she was living, and spent time getting to know her and learning about her wartime experiences.
Still, she knew next to nothing about her biological father.
“The only thing that she told me is that he was a very good singer and a dancer, that’s all,” she said.
After publishing her autobiography in Israel, researchers from the genealogical platform MyHeritage became involved in her quest to reveal her whole history.
“When we heard about Elana’s family’s story and the fact that she was unable to close the circle in life and to find out the identity of her father, we knew that we had a duty to help. This is what MyHeritage does,” said Roi Mandel, head of research for MyHeritage.
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“If we couldn’t do it, probably no one else would be able to and this was the reason why we decided to dive in.”
Using a DNA test and tapping into an extensive database, researchers were eventually able to determine the identity of Milman’s father.
“Several things happened in this research and only a perfect combination of all of them together could have made it successful. It was a DNA test. That was the first lead that we had, a tiny DNA match that that helped us. It was the first clue. Then, it was the professional genealogical research,” Mandel explained.
Milman’s father Eugeniusz Gorzkoś had long died but she was put in touch with his son, her half-brother Juliusz Gorzkoś, a 72-year-old retired veterinarian in northern Poland.
“This was really an important moment in my life,” she recalled about the day the two connected via Zoom.
“I saw a bold round face, smile, good eyes and I had a very feeling that we are going to get together very quickly.”
The first thing he shared about their father was his talent as a virtuoso violinist and accomplished singer.
“I burst in tears because I was a violinist and a singer,” she said.
The two have since met in his hometown and Milman said they remain in close contact.
“World War II is what we call a black hole in genealogy because there is a lot of information that is missing,” Mandel said. “Although 80 years have passed since the war, these things can happen and people can close the circle and find things about their past.”
Milman’s full story will now be published in an English translation of her autobiography soon to be released on Amazon, called The Secrets My Mother Kept.
Milman said her life story is about “identity and belonging.”
“It’s not just a kind of a phrase to say, ‘You need to know where you came from and where you are going to,’ this was my motto. I had to know who I am and I’m so happy that I never gave up.”
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