In the year 1943, 4 Jewish children from Amsterdam were herded onto trains and sent off to an unknown destination. Each of these children carried something with them: a small aluminum name tag given to them by their parents, stating their names, birthdates, and place of origin. The parents understood that their children might be separated from them in the chaos, and they wanted to make sure they would be reunited if that happened. Unfortunately, what happened next was much worse than any of these parents imagined. These families were all exterminated in the gas chambers at the infamous Sobibor ..read more

When Clare Reay’s son bought her a MyHeritage DNA test, she hoped to discover a little about her mother’s ethnic background. She never imagined that the test would lead her to solve the mystery of her mother’s origins and find the sisters who had been searching for her for more than 50 years. Watch their moving virtual reunion on this segment of the TODAY Show from this past weekend: Clare’s mother Evelyn always believed she had been born and orphaned in a concentration camp in 1945. She was told she was found there after liberation and sent to an orphanage in Israel, where she was adopted by ..read more

The last time Oren Schneider saw his beloved maternal grandfather Alexander Ruziak, the elderly man, who was 92 years old at the time, made an unusual request. For as long as Oren could remember, his grandfather had openly shared the unbelievable details of how he survived the horrors of the Holocaust. But though the importance of his grandfather’s life story was completely clear to Oren, Alexander had always been unsure it would be of interest to the rest of the world. In the spring of 2019, however, Alexander asked his grandson, for the first time ever, to share his story. And so, at the hei ..read more

When the Gestapo boarded the train carrying Marta and Alexandr Knapp during their attempted escape from Prague in June 1942, they had to make a fast decision. They knew that the Nazis would find them. They knew that they would probably never return from wherever they would be taken. And they knew that their baby daughter, Alice, had no chance of surviving if she stayed with them. So — like biblical Jochebed setting baby Moses afloat on the Nile — they decided to put their trust in fate. They left Alice on a bench outside the station and prayed that someone would find her and save her life. Som ..read more

Yael Feder Devonshire recently submitted an entry into the Father’s Day Lookalike Contest that caught our attention. Not only was the resemblance between her father Gershon Feder and son David (“Davey”) Feder Devonshire striking, but she also explained how special it is for her family to pass their family name to the next generation — since most of her family was tragically killed during the Holocaust. We asked her to tell us how her paternal grandparents (Gershon’s parents), Luba and Chaim Feder, survived the war. Do you have a story to share with us? Please do! Yael shares an abridged versio ..read more

The horrific events of the Holocaust tore apart countless families, many of whom were never reunited. One of these families was that of Gedalya and Miriam Sura Ehrenberg, a father and daughter separated during the war who spent the rest of their lives trying to find each other. Tragically, they didn’t succeed during their lifetimes. But thanks to MyHeritage DNA, the story didn’t end there. 80 years after Gedalya said goodbye to his daughter for the last time, their descendants have finally found each other. This story was originally featured in The Jerusalem Post Magazine on January 15, 2021 ..read more

Viktor Okmian, a Holocaust survivor, last saw his father Boris, mother Dobra, brother Ralph, and two grandparents in 1941. That was when his entire family was murdered by the Nazis in a Rumbula Forest massacre in Riga, Latvia. Some 25,000 Jews were killed during that event. Thanks to MyHeritage, 77 years after being separated from his parents, Viktor was finally able to see photos he had never seen of his family. Viktor, then 13, was at a summer camp. Two days before the Nazi occupation, the parents of another child at the camp managed to smuggle Viktor and his friends from the camp to Russia ..read more