A Jewish woman who was adopted as a baby after World War II had lost all hope of finding her father. This year, she gained a whole new family.

CNN
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Elana Millman published an autobiography last year about her lifelong search for her birth parents, but at the time she accepted she would never know the identity of her father.

But thanks to DNA testing and some serious “genealogy research”, Milman, a 77-year-old retired teacher who was born in the Bergen-Belsen refugee camp, has just returned from Poland, where she had an emotional reunion with her brother, whose existence she had never known until earlier this year.

Growing up on a kibbutz in northern Israel, Milman didn’t know his parents were not his biological parents until he was six years old. He recalls a friend telling him “a really big secret.”

“I remember like it was yesterday, the feeling of being stabbed in my stomach,” Millman, a retired teacher, told CNN in a video call.

When confronted, her parents admitted they didn’t bring her into the world, but said they loved her and were raising her to have a “wonderful life.”

For years, whenever she tried to discuss it, she was told, “You’ll understand when you grow up.”

It wasn’t until he was in his 30s that Millman finally found his birth certificate and, after careful investigation, traced him to his biological mother in Canada.

According to her birth certificate, she was born Helena Lewińska in 1947 in the Bergen-Belsen refugee camp, near the site of the Nazi concentration camp of the same name, the daughter of a Polish Jewish woman named Franziska Lewińska.

But in 1948, she arrived in what was then Palestine as part of a group of unaccompanied children from war-torn Europe just months before Israel’s independence. She was adopted by Eliezer and Hulda Rosenfeld, a childless couple from Kibbutz Merhavia, near Haifa.

After much difficulty, Millman eventually tracked down his birth mother in Canada; she had married and changed her name, and he spent a year there with her family. The two became close over the years, and before her death in the 1980s, his mother, who was known as Franka, told him much about her wartime past, including how she had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and survived the Holocaust by living on the other side of the city under an assumed name, and how her parents and siblings had perished in the Nazi Treblinka death camp. She refused, however, to reveal the identity of Millman’s father.

Milman’s birth certificate listed his name as Eugenius Lewinsky, but she could find no evidence of a person by that name and her investigation hit a dead end.

“Every time I asked my mother a question, like what happened during the war or who my father was, she told me different stories,” she told CNN. “When I asked too many questions, she would say, ‘All I can tell you is that my father was a very good singer, a very good dancer and very handsome.'”

Milman, who has four children and 10 grandchildren, published an autobiography last year aptly titled “You’ll Know When You Grow Up.” In an interview with an Israeli magazine at the time, she said she had accepted that she would never know who her father was.

She said Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of The founder of genealogy platform MyHeritage, he read the article, passed it on to his research team and asked: “Is there anything I can help you with?”

With Millman’s consent, they embarked on “genealogical research,” according to Roy Mandel, MyHeritage’s director of research.

There are few clues, and Lewinska is somehow a “father.” She listed the male version of her surname on her birth certificate, giving the impression that she was married.

But Milman took a DNA test, and it was conclusive: she was found to be 50% Ashkenazi Jewish and 50% Eastern European, and matched a Polish woman living in France. The two shared 2.3% DNA. A set of common great-grandparents.

The Polish woman could not explain the relationship, There was a small family tree, but MyHeritage built it using its vast database of historical documents and with the help of expert researchers who combed through Polish archives.

“Fortunately, a slight match found in a DNA test between Elana and a Polish user was just the little clue we needed,” Mandel told CNN in an email.

“The research took six months, as part of which we created a family tree, mapping eight sets of great-grandparents and closely examining each family line and their male descendants. We marked potential candidates in the right place, at the right time and at the right age.”

Researchers estimate the time period to be between April 24 and 28, 1946, and say there are six main suspects.

Luckily, they got lucky on their first try after deciding to focus on a man with the same name as listed on his birth certificate: Eugeniusz Gorzkoś.

Mandel’s team then located and contacted Gorczkosz’s son, Julius, a 72-year-old retired veterinarian who lives in northern Poland.

Shocked but intrigued, he agreed to a DNA test, which proved that he and Millman were half-brothers.

The two first “met” at a virtual reunion hosted by MyHeritage in March. Speaking through an interpreter, Millman told his brother that discovering his identity had been “my life’s project.”

Gorskos told his sister that their father was a virtuoso violinist. And he was a singer. Upon hearing this, Millman began to cry and said, “He was a violinist? Oh, my God, I played the violin, too. For ten years! I played in orchestras, and I was a singer.”

Last month, she visited Poland with her adult granddaughter and met Mr. Gorczkosz. Her brother and one of his sons greeted them at the airport with flowers and warm hugs. “I immediately sensed that blood is not water,” she told CNN.

The two women spent several days at Gorzkosz’s home in the village of Blzyno, northwest of the capital, Warsaw. There, their English-speaking son acted as a go-between.

“The family said we looked alike,” Millman said, adding that she had met Gorzkosi’s sister, Eva, Millman’s other half-sibling, but had never spoken to her before.

“They prepared an album for me of my father and his family,” she said, adding that she noticed an “incredible” physical resemblance to some of her own family members.

Millman said she was “very happy” to have been able to contact her brother and his family and that it had gone “above and beyond” anything she had hoped for.

She also traveled to Warsaw with her granddaughter and one of her brother’s sons, where they encountered a situation that left Millman “horrified.”

On one side of the street there was a monument marking the wall that separated the Jewish ghetto from the rest of the city. The marker commemorated resistance fighters who were shot dead by German forces in 1944 while suppressing the Warsaw Uprising led by the Polish underground movement Armia Craiova (Home Army).

She said the “defining moment” of her trip was when she realised she was standing on the spot where her parents fought the Nazis 80 years ago.

“I am the descendant of a Polish-Jewish mother, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and a Polish-Catholic father, a former Polish army fighter who was wounded and captured on the first day of the Polish Uprising on August 1, 1944.”

She added: “I have finally closed the circle of my belonging on both my paternal and maternal lines.”

Gorskos told CNN she never expected to meet another sister “even in my deepest dreams.”

“I thought I was nearing the end of my life,” he told CNN in a video call, but the connection made him feel like “I was born a few months ago.”

Gorskos’ father died in 1966, but Eugenius and his mother separated when Gorskos was a child, so he “hardly remembers” him. “I never thought my family was incomplete,” Gorskos said. “It’s really surprising.”

Speaking of Millman’s recent visit, he said: “After a few hours, we didn’t feel like we didn’t know each other. It felt as if we’d known each other for a long time.”

Gorskos told CNN that Eugenius was too young to be drafted when war broke out, but joined the resistance in 1940. Three years later he was arrested. He was arrested by the Germans for distributing resistance leaflets and imprisoned in Warsaw for several months.

According to his son, he was wounded in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and then sent to a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he remained after liberation.

It is possible that he met Lewińska here, or that their paths may have already crossed in Warsaw during the war. Mysteries remain, but Millman can speculate. You will never know the truth.

“It’s less important to me now than it was when I wrote the book and I thought this was the most important thing. It’s not like that anymore,” she said. Her autobiography will soon be released in English on Amazon under the title “The Secret My Mother Hidden.”

Mandel said MyHeritage felt an “obligation” to support Millman, and stressed that while the project had taken a lot of detailed research and “sound intuition”, modern technology was key.

“When the DNA test confirmed the results and the identities of Elena’s half-brother and father were known beyond doubt, we felt great pride and great excitement. Elena’s circle had been closed,” he said.

These factors partly explain why long-buried family secrets are only coming to light now.

“Eighty years have passed since the war, but with archives now digitally available through digital platforms like MyHeritage, we are seeing more stories and new discoveries relating to the war,” Mandel said.

“Also, as in this case, DNA testing can scientifically and conclusively confirm a research hypothesis and sometimes serve as the foundation or starting point for historical research. Technology can fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle.”