For decades, Jackie Young had been searching. Orphaned as an infant, he spent the first few years of his life in a Nazi internment camp in what is now the Czech Republic. After World War II he was taken to England, adopted and given a new name.
As an adult, he struggled to learn of his origins and his family. He had some scant information about his mother, who died in a concentration camp, but nothing except a blank space on a birth certificate about his father.
That changed earlier this year when genealogists used a DNA sample to help find a name and some relatives he never knew he had.
Photo: AP
Having that answer to a lifelong question has been “amazing,” said Young, now 80 and living in London.
It “opened the door that I thought would never get opened,” he said.
There is an effort under way to bring that possibility to other Holocaust survivors and their children.
The New York-based Center for Jewish History is launching the DNA Reunion Project, offering DNA testing kits for free through an application on its Web site. For those who use the kits, it is also offering a chance to get some guidance on next steps from the genealogists who worked with Young.
Those genealogists, Jennifer Mendelsohn and Adina Newman, have been doing this kind of work over the past several years, and run a Facebook group about Jewish DNA and genetic genealogy.
The advent of DNA technology has opened up a new world of possibilities in addition to the paper trails and archives that Holocaust survivors and their descendants have used to learn about family connections severed by genocide, Newman said.
“There are times when people are separated and they don’t even realize they’re separated. Maybe a name change occurred so they didn’t know to look for the other person,” she said. “There are cases that simply cannot be solved without DNA.”
While interest in genealogy and family trees is widespread, there is a particular poignancy in doing this work in a community where so many family ties have been ripped apart because of the Holocaust, Mendelsohn said.
Her earliest effort in this arena was for her husband’s grandmother, who had lost her mother in a concentration camp. That effort led to aunts and cousins that no one in her husband’s family had known about.
Her husband’s uncle called afterward and said: “You know, I’ve never seen a photograph of my grandmother. Now that I see photographs of her sisters, it’s so comforting to me. I can imagine what she look [sic] like,” she said.
“How do you explain why that’s powerful? It just is. People had nothing. Their families were erased. And now we can bring them back a little bit,” Mendelsohn said.
She and Newman take pains to emphasize that there are no guarantees. Doing the testing or searching archives does not mean a guarantee of finding living relatives or new information, but it offers a chance.
Rosenfeld said the center had allocated an initial US$15,000 for the DNA kits in the pilot effort, which would cover about 500 of them.
They would look to scale up further if they see enough interest, he said.
Young definitely feels there should be.
“I’ve been wanting to know all my life,” he said. “If I hadn’t known what I do know now, I think I would still felt that my left arm or my right arm wasn’t fully formed. Family is everything, it’s the major pillar of life in humanity.”
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