Adriana Turk spent her whole life believing that her entire family tree had been wiped out in the Holocaust.
Growing up with her parents and brother in the small coastal town of Merimbula in southeastern Australia, she felt an unease about the unanswered questions of her past. Her childhood was defined by a deep loneliness and a struggle to fit in.
After her brother died, Ms Turk decided to do a DNA testto understand her history. She expected little more than a few details and some context about her background.
What she found changed her life: more than 50 of her family members were living all over the world, including dozens of cousins, aunts and uncles as well as their children and grandchildren.
Ms Turk, 74, is among a growing number of Jewish people who have reconnected with long-lost family through DNA testing. After the Nazi regime killed six million Jews across Europe, those who survived often had no clue where their loved ones ended up – leaving families broken and fragmented. But now new technology is reuniting them.
Born to a German Jewish father who fled Nazi Germany in 1937, Ms Turk had been told that all of her family members were brutally murdered in Hitler’s genocide. Her grandmother died in the Warsaw Ghetto, while her aunt, uncle and their two young children were killed in Auschwitz in 1944.
“I guess I just assumed there was no-one out there,” she told The Independent as the world prepared to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Tuesday. “And with losing my brother, it really left such an emptiness, and I thought: ‘Well, what can I find?’ And I found everything.”
She discovered the descendants of three Holocaust survivors from her grandmother’s family line through MyHeritage DNA. They included Renate Püttmann who survived the killings across Europe after being hidden as a teenager by a German soldier who falsified her documents at great risk. Renate had eight children whose descendants went on to live in multiple countries including Germany, Brazil and Israel.
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The joy of her discovery was bittersweet, as it arrived at the same time that Australia was reeling from the deadliest antisemitic attack in its history. Two gunmen killed 15 Jewish people, including a 10-year-old child, when they opened fire at Sydney’s Bondi Beach at a Hannukah event. Ms Turk, who lives in the area, was shaken by the deaths.
Last week, Ms Turk connected with her cousin Raanan Gidron, 73, a psychotherapist living in Israel. His mother was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp where 33,000 Jewish people were murdered, and later to Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people were killed. She survived and fled Europe, later marrying a man who had also lost his parents to the Holocaust.
“We always knew there were some relatives in New Zealand,” Mr Gridron said. “But it was hard to follow up.”
Naama Lanski, a researcher at MyHeritage DNA, reached out to facilitate a reunion. “It was magical to see Adriana in person, with the same face and eyes,” Mr Gridron said.
The cousins plan to meet up in August in Europe and Ms Turk is excited to see the family she has longed to meet for the first time. She said that her humour is more similar to the people she has never met than those she was raised around.
Ms Turk believes that she has now found “a missing piece” of her life.
“As a child I used to feel invisible. I felt empty. How do you feel something when you don’t know what it is? But I’ve found it now.”
Mr Gidron said that their reunion sends a message of hope at a time of fear and anxiety for the Jewish community.
“The very fact that we met two days ago for the first time is a living proof that life continues. We are not alone anymore. Fractured families in the Jewish world coming together and healing again is important for everyone. For humanity.”
