Holocaust survivor spots long-lost cousin on TV

Friday, January 27, brings International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but it was on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day last April that Holocaust survivor Yaffa Kaplowitz discovered a long-lost cousin.

Kaplowitz, who lives in northern Israel, was watching the nationally televised ceremony held annually at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem memorial on the eve of the national day of mourning, when she heard Zehava Roth speak. Roth, also a survivor, began her speech with a brief history of her own family.

She told the audience that she was the daughter of Moshe and Channa Brodman of NowyVisnizce, Poland, who perished, along with her older brother Benzion during the war.

Kaplowitz, watching the ceremony from her living room, was the only daughter of Hirsch — Moshe’s brother — and Ita Brodman, and had been placed by her parents with a non-Jewish family during the war. Her parents were deported to Auschwitz, where they perished.

After the war, one of Kaplowitz’s maternal uncles found her, and they emigrated to the US, where she grew up. She later immigrated to Israel.

Kaplowitz had always believed she was the sole survivor of the Brodman family, and was in utter shock while listening to Brodman’s speech about her parents and brother.

She reached out to Magen David Adom, having heard about the national ambulance service’s division for tracing family members lost due to conflict and tragedy.

The MDA operates within the international movement of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and as such, has access to a massive database that is often used in the tracing services.

The MDA tracing service immediately began researching Kaplowitz’s family history, and contacted Brodman to learn more about her past.

Brodman, according to MDA, was seven years old when she escaped the Bochnia Ghetto in southern Poland, surviving on her own. She ended up on the Kindertransport to England, later immigrating to Israel where she married and had her own family.

She also believed she was the last survivor of her father’s family.

The local MDA tracing services contacted the Belgian Red Cross and found that Kaplowitz’s paternal grandparents were Avner and Lea Brodman, names that Kaplowitz hadn’t known beforehand.

When Brodman was asked for the names of her paternal grandparents, she said they were Avner and Lea Brodman.

It then became clear that Kaplowitz’s and Brodman’s fathers were brothers.

The two women first spoke on the phone for hours, reported the MDA, unable to believe that they had found one another, living in the same country.

More documentation from Belgium had letters from Kaplowitz’s father, in which he mentioned two cousins living in the US. Using an online database, the MDA service located the cousins’ descendants in San Diego, and made contact with them.

“People are in utter shock when we find their family, they cannot believe that after all these years there are family members that are still alive,” said Susan Edel, a volunteer with the tracing services of the MDA. “Even when we are able to provide people with documentation, photos, or other information about the fate of their loved ones, it lets them reach closure. They know that they can stop looking. There’s a sense of peace of mind that now they at least know what happened to them.”

The two cousins have now discovered an extended family in Israel and the US, and are planning a reunion when part of their American family visits Israel this year.

“From the age of 4, I believed I was the only survivor of my father’s family,” said Kaplowitz. “After all the years of believing I no longer had close family on my father’s side, it is an amazing feeling and a great comfort to me.”