Holocaust hidden child, who never knew his family, meets a cousin for first time

Bernard Krutz never knew his parents. A Holocaust survivor who was hidden as a toddler during the war and was then adopted by a Polish Jewish family after the war, he didn’t remember his parents or his family name. On Thursday, with the help of DNA testing, Yad Vashem and the decades-long investigative efforts of his daughter, Lisa Baron, Krutz, now around 81, met his first cousin, Esti Kisseloff, 72, born in Israel and living in Tel Aviv.

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Yad Vashem had testimony given by Kisseloff’s mother in 1956, testifying that Bernard’s father had been killed in the Warsaw Ghetto and that his son, Bernard, known then as Bolek, had been killed as well. “The combination of the DNA and this testimony allowed this reunion,” said Dayan. “This kind of thing happens rarely and it happens less and less, but miracles do happen.” Kisseloff’s mother thought she was giving testimony for posterity, because she believed he was dead, added Dayan. “She did it for her family.”

Krutz, his wife Sonya, and their daughter, Lisa Baron, had come up against a series of dead-ends in their search for more information about Krutz’s family. After a trip to Poland yielded no new details, Baron posted her dilemma on a Jewish genealogy group on Facebook. After repeatedly being told to do DNA testing, she bought a DNA test and convinced her father to take it.

They found that the name Krutz had been given in Poland, Bolek Szczycki, by the family that hid him, appeared on other family trees. It all fell into place, said Baron, now that he had a name. She contacted Yad Vashem, which then looked for the name Bolek Szczycki, found it connected to Esti Kisseloff’s mother, and gave them Esti’s phone number. Kisseloff did a DNA test in July, and the results came back showing that she and Krutz were cousins.

The only snafu in this discovery of first cousins was Baron’s efforts to bring her parents to Israel to meet Kisseloff, as Israel was only allowing in first-degree relatives. It took three weeks of negotiations, and working with former MK Dov Lipman’s Yad L’Olim organization, until the Krutzes were able to come to Israel with a humanitarian exception.

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https://www.timesofisrael.com/holocaust-hidden-child-who-never-knew-his-family-meets-a-cousin-for-first-time/