77 Years After the Holocaust, DNA Test Connects Survivor with Descendants of Surviving Relatives

Eva Szepesi was just 7 years old when World War II broke out and turned her life upside down.

Living in Pesterzsébet, a district of Budapest, Hungary, with her parents Valeria and Karoly and her little brother Tamás, the shadow of Nazi Germany grew darker each day. Finally, a few years into the war, Eva’s aunt informed her that they were leaving — just like that. Where would they go? What about Eva’s parents? All Eva was told was that her mother needed to stay behind with her brother, who was too young to travel, and that her father had already left to “work.” She later learned that he had been sent to a forced labor camp. She never got to say goodbye.

Eva’s family had purchased a fictitious ID for her: the passport of a neighbor of theirs named Maria. To ensure that no one would know the truth of her identity, Eva was instructed not to speak at all and to pretend she was deaf and mute. She and her aunt walked for 11 hours through the forest until they crossed the border to Slovakia.

他们的目的地是一个叫Nové Mesto nad Váhom的村庄。在那里，当地的拉比负责寻找一个家庭收养伊娃，伊娃的阿姨离开了。世界杯东道主2022伊娃被带到一个陌生人的家里，她在那里住了一段时间，直到这家人无力抚养她世界杯东道主2022。她被转移到村里的另一个地方，一直待到1944年11月，纳粹找到了她。伊娃被带到斯洛伐克的Sered集中营，那里是被驱逐出斯洛伐克的第二波犹太人的出发地，他们被分散到不同的地方。他们的目的地之一是奥斯维辛，伊娃就是被送到那里的。

Eva survives Auschwitz

就这样，1944年11月2日，12岁的伊娃独自一人来到奥斯维辛集中营。当她在臭名昭著的营地入口处等待时，一个她不认识的女人转向她说，“你必须告诉他们你16岁了。不要告诉他们你还年轻。”

事实上，当轮到她的时候，德国人问她的名字、出生地和年龄。一开始，她不知道该说什么，但后来她决定听从那位女士的建议，不假思索地回答说:“我16岁了。”

最后一刻的决定很可能救了她的命。纳粹派她去工作;如果他们知道她只有12岁，她可能会被送进毒气室。伊娃后来寻找了那个可能用这个建议救了她一命的神秘女人，想要感谢她，但她一直没有找到她。

纳粹在伊娃的手臂上纹了A26877这个数字。但对12岁的伊娃来说，最糟糕的事情是他们剃掉了她美丽的头发。

Eva spent several terrible months at Auschwitz. On January 18, the Nazis retreated from the advancing Russian army and took the remaining survivors with them on a death march, abandoning those who were thought too weak to survive the journey. Eva was among those left behind.

There she stayed until Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. Eva was found in the cold, among the corpses, starving and thirsty after not having anything to eat or drink for more than a week. She was one of only 400 children to have survived the concentration camps.

Returning to Hungary

Once the war was over, displaced people began to return to Hungary. Lists of returning citizens were posted at the train stations so their family members would know to expect them. Eva’s name appeared on one of these lists, and her uncle Imre Hegedüs and aunt Olga were waiting for her when she arrived. They took her home and told her that from now on, she would be their daughter.

She was afraid to ask what had happened to her parents. She was still a young girl; perhaps she imagined that as long as she didn’t hear the worst possible news, the fear of losing her parents would not become reality.

Not much was left for Eva. She had no family and no home, and most of her family photos were gone. But one photo did survive, a photo that featured her uncles.

This photo would play a key role in the discovery of unknown family members in Israel many years later.

In the photo, left to right: bottom row, Eva’s mother Valeria, her brother Tamas, Eva, and Eva’s father Karoly Diamant. Top row: Eva’s uncles Zoltan and Oszkar Lowy

A family of her own

战后，伊娃开始在布达佩斯做裁缝。在工作中，她遇到了后来成为她丈夫的人:安多尔·“班迪”·塞佩西(Andor“Bandi”Szepesi)。两人于1951年同居并结婚，当时伊娃19岁。

In 1952, their eldest daughter, Judith, was born. Four years later, in October 1956, the Hungarian Revolution broke out: a grassroots uprising against the influence of the Soviet Union in Hungary. Due to the situation in Hungary, Andor, who was a furrier, received a job offer in Germany — and the family relocated.

In 1964, Eva gave birth to another daughter, and they named her Anita.

Telling her story

Ever since the war ended, Eva kept her traumatic memories to herself and didn’t speak about what happened during the Holocaust. But in 1995, when the world marked the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Eva received an invitation to attend a commemorative event in Auschwitz.

At first, Eva wasn’t interested. But her daughters Judith and Anita encouraged her to go even though they still knew nothing about her story or the terrible things she experienced. In the end, they convinced her, and she went.

在奥斯维辛，伊娃遇到了很多人，其中一些人本身就是幸存者，还有一些人是来纪念那些逝去的人的年轻人。一个人走到她面前，问她是否可以讲述她的故事，就在这时，伊娃第一次讲述了她童年以来一直萦绕在心头的记忆。从那一刻起，她下定决心要把自己的故事告诉尽可能多的人。

She wrote one book herself,Ein Mädchen allein auf der Flucht(A Young Girl Alone in Flight), and then was interviewed for another book,My Afternoon with Eva, written by the well-known German TV presenter Bärbel Schäfer. In addition, Eva’s name became connected with the story of the Holocaust at Auschwitz. She was interviewed in a number of German news outlets; there is a page dedicated to her story on the website of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation; she has been hosted in schools and institutions; and she even won a number of awards in Germany for her work.

In 2016, Eva participated in the March of the Living in Auschwitz together with her family. There, she opened a list of the names of those who died at the camp, and found her parents’ names there. Even though it had been many, many years since she returned to Hungary, the finality of those names on that list hit her hard. It felt as though she had only just internalized that they were never coming back.

A surprise DNA match and two familiar faces

When Eva and her daughter Anita heard about at-home DNA tests, their curiosity was piqued. They decided to order DNA kits and see if they could find any unknown family members.

And that’s when it happened: Eva received a DNA match with someone she didn’t know, a woman named Naama Levy Eylam who lives in Israel.

纳玛几个月前做了DNA测试，因为她对家族史也很感兴趣。世界杯东道主2022

纳玛看到DNA匹配的结果时，难以置信地揉了揉眼睛。伊娃这个名字她不认识。当她看到伊娃来自布达佩斯时，她猜测伊娃一定来自她已故的祖母家，因为他们是匈牙利人。世界杯东道主2022但当她开始在网上搜索时，她发现了伊娃发布的一张照片——她小时候的照片，背景是两个男人。这些人在纳玛看来很眼熟。She was sure she had seen them before.

Naama called her father, told him about the DNA match, showed him the photo, and shared that she felt she had seen these men in a different photo.

“I found the photo of Zoltan and Oszkar when I began writing my historical novel,Everything She Left Behind,which tells the love story of my grandparents, Imre and Klara Levi,” says Naama. “To tell the story of Imre, who was from the Lowy family in Slovakia, I had to dig into historical documents and photos he left behind. Imre, who was left alone after the Holocaust, held on to a few photos of the family members he had lost, and among them was the photo of his beloved cousins who died in the Holocaust. I didn’t know much about the two young men in the photo, but their faces remained etched in my memory for years afterwards. I kept this photo among the documents I used when writing the book. In the meantime, the book had already been published, but I didn’t forget Zoltan and Oszkar Lowy. After the DNA match with Eva, I searched for her name online and found her photograph, with these two good-looking men standing behind her — none other than Imre’s beloved cousins. When I searched for that photo again in my home, I found it among all the documents I’d used when I was writing, waiting to be rediscovered.”

Naama showed the photo to her father Israel, who remembered more details: “My father is the family historian, and when I showed him the photo I’d found, he know exactly who they were: Oszkar and Zoltan Lowy, cousins of my grandfather, Imre Lowy, who lived in Slovakia. My father even remembered that his father was very close to them, because when he was 13, he and his family ran into financial trouble, and he moved in with these cousins for a full year. I imagine that when my grandfather understood that they had perished, he kept their photo to remember them by, and that’s how it remained in my family’s possession.”

The families connect

现在她明白了配对的重要性，Naama回到了她在MyHeritage上的DNA结果，并开始试图联系伊娃。“我看到她是一位年长的女性，89岁，所以我认为联系她年轻的家庭成员会更有意义。世界杯东道主2022我在MyHeritage上发现了她女儿安妮塔的名字，我在Facebook上查找了她的名字，并写信给她:“你好，我是以色列的纳玛，伊姆雷·洛伊的孙女。“当然，我没有忘记附上照片，最后我问了一个问题:‘也许你认识这张照片里的人?’”

When Anita received Naama’s message, she couldn’t believe her eyes. She immediately sent the photo to her daughter Celina and her sister Judith. Celina was certain: these are your great-uncles. They are younger in this photograph, but there’s no doubt that they are the same people.

Anita wrote back to Naama right away that these were close family members who had died in the Holocaust. Oszkar and Zoltan were Eva’s uncles on her mother’s side of the family.

That very evening, the families spoke via video chat: on one end, Eva and her daughters in Germany, and on the other end, Naama and her father in Israel.

This was the first time Eva had found family members that had survived the Holocaust. But in addition to the exciting family discovery, Naama sent Eva another photo of her great-grandmother, Rachela Lowy, who was born in the 1860s and whom Eva had never met.

“Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away,” says Naama. “He did not live to see all this, but we are doing it all for him and in his name.”

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the family has yet to meet face to face, but they are closely in touch via Whatsapp, and hope that soon, when travel restrictions are lifted, they will be able to reunite at last.