After fleeing the Nazis during WWII, two cousins who each thought the other had died in the Holocaust met for the first time in 75 years.
Their emotionally-charged embrace will leave you in tears, so go grab the tissues!
Reunions between Holocaust survivors are getting increasingly rare these days because the people who experienced the atrocities of Hitler’s WWII are simply getting old.
But thankfully, cousins Morris Sana, 87 (pictured below in blue), and Simon Mairowitz, 85, who were childhood friends before they fled for their lives, are here to tell us their story of finding each other after way too many decades apart.
When the Nazis invaded Romania in the 1940s, Morris Sana and Simon Mairowitz, who were just boys at the time, fled the country separately with their respective families.
They grew up believing that the other had passed away in a concentration camp.
Since Simon’s side of the family was listed as “perished” in the Holocaust at Yad Vashem, which is the official memorial to Holocaust victims in Israel, Morris had no reason to believe his cousin (pictured below in the checkered shirt) was still alive.
However, their families never gave up hope of finding out the truth.
Thanks to DNA tests and research on genealogy sites, it was discovered that both men were still alive!
The Holocaust memorial may have gotten it wrong, but Morris and Simon were about to make things right.
Since both families were headed to Israel for different reasons, they decided to change their plane tickets so they could all meet up on the same date.
But, how exactly are you supposed to greet someone after you’ve lived a full life and have a ton of things to catch up on?
After all, these two last saw each other as 10 and 12-year-olds before WWII changed their lives forever.
In the touching video of their reunion, Morris kept it simple, telling his long-lost friend, “Good to see you.
“Good to see you after all these years,” said Simon. “Seventy-five years you waited.”
Both men’s eyes welled up as they cradled each other’s faces.
Although Morris escaped Romania with his mother and sister, the “fleeing” part continued for 2 more years. To evade capture, the trio slept during the day between dead bodies and traveled at night when it was safer. Sadly, his brothers had already been killed by the Nazis at that point.
His daughter believes Morris only survived because he had blonde hair and blue eyes, which were the coveted features of Hitler’s “Aryan race.”
The family stayed at a refugee camp in Italy for six months before they were later smuggled into Paris, and from there, they moved to Israel, where Morris now lives.
Simon, on the other hand, managed to escape to England with his sister, which wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the kindness of an English colonel. He was placed in foster care and raised as a Catholic, whereas Morris grew up Jewish.
To celebrate their reunion, both families drove to Yad Vashem and changed the archive records to indicate they were “survivors.”
Watch the touching reunion between these two childhood friends in the video below.
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