Warsaw Ghetto Boy Found His Family at 83, DNA Test, Escaped Holocaust in Rucksack Age 2 [View all]

- 'I knew nothing’: the Warsaw ghetto boy who found his family at 83, The Guardian, Jan. 27, 2024.

A DNA test has helped Shalom Koray find relatives in the US after escaping the Holocaust in a rucksack at the age of two. In 1943, a two-year-old boy found wandering the streets of the Warsaw ghetto at the height of the Jewish uprising was smuggled out in a rucksack, probably by a police officer.

The identity of the child could not be known. There was no one to attest even to a first name. His early life would be spent hidden away in orphanages, still not safe from antisemitic persecution, and without any real understanding of what it was to have a parent.

Five months ago, that same boy, now 83, discovered a family thanks to the desire of an American woman to trace her ancestry, the curiosity of a Polish academic about the plight of those orphaned by the Holocaust, and an advance in DNA technology that has made the dogged efforts of a researcher possible.

Shalom Koray, the name the boy was given at the age of eight on emigrating to Israel in 1949, will this summer meet for the first time a blood relative beyond that of his own three children and eight grandchildren: Ann Meddin Hellman, 77, a cousin from Charleston, South Carolina. It might be said to represent a defeat, however small, for the hate that destroyed so many futures, the consequences of which are being marked on Saturday’s Holocaust Memorial Day – the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp...More,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/27/i-knew-nothing-the-warsaw-ghetto-boy-who-found-his-family-at-83-holocaust-survivor