102-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Meets The Nephew He Thought Couldn’t Exist
Image by Humans of Judaism/Facebook
By Ari Feldman November 20, 2017
A 102-year-old Holocaust survivor thought everyone in his family died during the war — until he was reunited his nephew last week in Israel.
Eliahu Pietruszka fled Poland in 1939. His parents and a brother, Zelig, died in a concentration camp. But Zelig’s twin, Volf, was captured by the Russian army and sent to a Siberian work camp. Pietruszka had always assumed that Volf died there.
Then a Canadian genealogist sent Pietruszka’s grandson a letter: She had discovered that in 2005, Volf had written about Pietruszka for Yad Vashem’s massive database. Though Volf died in 2011, his son, Alexandre, was still living in a remote city in Russia.
They arranged for Alexandre to come visit Pietruszka in his retirement home in Kfar Saba. Upon meeting, the two men fell into tears.
“You are a copy of your father,” said Pietruszka, who was shaking. “I haven’t slept in two nights waiting for you.”
As more Holocaust survivors die, genealogists for Yad Vashem think this may be one of the last such reunions that their database of testimonials can create. One Yad Vashem official who saw the Pietruszka reunion called it “the end of an era.”
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
