In 1943, a two-year-old boy was found wandering the streets of the Warsaw ghetto at the height of the Jewish uprising, probably smuggled out in a backpack by a policeman.
The identity of the child cannot be known. No one even confirmed the name. He spent his early life in an orphanage, still not immune to anti-Semitism and without truly understanding what it meant to be a parent.
Five months ago, the boy, now 83, discovered a family thanks to an American woman’s desire to trace her ancestry, a Polish scholar’s curiosity about the plight of Holocaust orphans and advances in DNA technology that allowed research Made possible by the tireless efforts of personnel.
Shalom Koray was the name the boy was given when he immigrated to Israel in 1949 at the age of 8. This summer, he will meet for the first time a blood relative besides his three children and eight grandchildren: Ann Meddin Hellman, 77, of Charleston, S.C. younger brother.
Arguably, it represents a failure, however small, for the hatred that destroyed so many futures, the consequences of which will be remembered on Saturday, Holocaust Remembrance Day – the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Anniversary shows up.
“You can’t go looking for something if you don’t know what you want to find,” Corey said of the family he found. “I don’t know anything. Without DNA testing, it’s like nothing.”
After Kore was smuggled out of the ghetto in 1943, he was left in the care of a Catholic institution named after Saint Andrew Bobol in the southern Polish town of Zakopane.
It was here that Lena Küchler-Silberman, a Polish Jew who worked for the Resistance under a pseudonym after the war, discovered him and other orphans, all emaciated and wild.
She was assigned to look after them by what she called the Jewish Council, with the aim of bringing them to Palestine.
Corey remembers his heroine’s visit. “We were sitting there, I didn’t know what we were doing, there were a lot of kids in the hall, no chairs, no anything,” he recalled. “There was a fireplace in the middle. She stood in the doorway and started throwing sweets into the hall. I told myself: ‘If I leave the fireplace, I will lose my place next to it’.” I gave up candy. I just stayed by the fireplace. “
In a 1946 interview, Küchler-Silberman recounted her own memories. “When I showed up with the candy, these kids were throwing themselves at me and screaming so horribly,” she said. “One child trampled on another child, one child pushed another child away…these children pushed me completely against the wall, and the dean’s mother had to come to save me. These were children between the ages of two and five.”
She took five Jewish children (three boys and two girls) and joined as many as 100 people. They traveled to Czechoslovakia and France, and finally, in 1949, a small group immigrated to Israel with Kuchler-Silkerman. Korczak, who was named Piotr Korczak in Poland, was later adopted and his name was changed. He now lives in northern Israel and has worked on trucks most of his life.
Without the work of Magdalena Smoczyńska, professor emeritus at Jagiellonian University, the history of Kore would have remained a mystery.
For five years, Smochinska has been studying the fate of about 100 children, including those in Zakopane, who survived the Holocaust and were placed in orphanages at the end of the war.
Last summer, she approached Koray and asked him to provide a cheek swab for a MyHeritage DNA test, which can be used to find matches to other people.
In September, on the other side of the world, Ann Meddin Hellman was notified of just such a match. Her interest in Jewish heritage led to her being awarded the Order of the Jewish Palm in South Carolina in 2015.
“His name means nothing to me,” she admits, but thanks to the work of researcher Daniel Horowitz, a family tree is slowly being built.
It is understood that Meddin Hellman’s grandfather, Abraham Louis Mednitzky Meddin, immigrated to the United States in 1893, unknowingly moving his family from the imminent Saved from the horrors of the coming European genocide.
He had a brother, Yaddia Mednitsky, who fatefully left behind. DNA testing proved that Korey was likely Mednitsky’s grandson.
The family resemblance only added to the shock.”When the photo came out, my husband and I said, ‘That’s my brother,'” Medine Herman said. “We both thought the family had been wiped out. Searching for Shalom is a miracle. “
