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Over 75 years ago a mother and her daughter were tragically separated at Auschwitz concentration camp and spent their entire lives searching for each other.
But now thanks to advances in technology, the family have finally been able to reconnect.
Dena Morris, 73, and Jean Gerhart, 75, were surprised when their niece Clare Reay, 52, turned up unannounced in Ohio after their family were separated during World War II.
Clare, from Newcastle, travelled from London on her very long-awaited trip to the US to surprise her biological aunts.
She finally met them face-to-face for the first time after discovering they existed through a shocking DNA match last year.
Her aunts had been searching for her their entire lives.
Clare told the Daily Star: “The reunion was fantastic, I was so incredibly excited to meet my aunts in person, it's one thing seeing each other on Zoom but to be able to see each other and spend time together was wonderful.
“Their reaction was even better than I expected, I'm so pleased we got it on camera as it was all such a blur at the time."
During World War II when Clare’s mother, Eva, was just a young girl when she was separated from her mother Dora in Auschwitz and they were never able to find each other.
The Auschwitz concentration camp was operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust.
It was the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centres, with more than 1.1million men, women and children losing their lives there.
Thankfully both Eva and Dora survived – and Eva was brought to Palestine and then adopted and moved to Britain shortly after.
“My mother had no recollection at all of her time in the concentration camp,” Clare explained.
“She didn't know anything about her mother, she always believed she hadn't survived the war. Her earliest recollections were from the orphanage in Palestine.”
After the war, Dora moved to America and gave birth to her two daughters, Dena and Joan.
The sisters had promised their late mother that they would never stop searching for their sister and they have now delivered on that lifelong promise.
Thankfully, a DNA match was found in England – but with Eva's daughter, not their sister, as she had died in February 2014.
This means that if Eva were still alive today, she would’ve found her half-sisters.
Instead, these sisters have made the amazing discovery of finding their niece.
“At no time did it ever occur to me that my mother had any surviving family," Clare explained.
“My son bought me a MyHeritage DNA kit as a gift and when I did it, I thought it would be nice to know a bit about our family history in terms of our ethnicity and where we come from. Never expected in a million years to find close family!”
In April this year, one of the aunts was diagnosed with stage four of an aggressive kind of cancer and brain tumours.
Due to how dire her situation was looking, doctors only gave her approximately six months to live. Thankfully, she has already outlived this.
This being said, this visit has been a race against time. Clare has done everything in her power to visit her aunts after originally being rejected due to strict COVID travel restrictions.
“We've always been a small family from my dad's side, so it's just so lovely to know we've got this beautiful extended family on my mother's side now,” Clare said.
“Now that I've been to see them I really hope they'll come here for a visit, it's been talked about so fingers crossed that might happen this year."
Clare said the reunion is bittersweet, as she wishes her mother and grandmother were alive to see it.
She explained: “I think they'd both be ecstatic if they'd been around to experience finding each other like this, just like we were.
“The most heartbreaking thing about this whole situation is that neither of them are here to see this.”
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