An Australian woman who thought her Jewish family members had been lost in the Holocaust over 80 years ago says she feels blessed to have found about 50 living relatives through DNA testing.
“For me, it’s like having a black-and-white photograph turn into color,” Adriana Turk told ABC News of finding her lost relatives. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. I put the last little piece in.”
The 74-year-old said she grew up not knowing much about her late father, John Hans Turk, except that he was Jewish, had fled Nazi Germany in 1937 to New Zealand, where she was raised, and thought his entire family had died in the Holocaust.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 6 million Jews in Europe died in the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945 after the Nazi German regime and its Axis allies arrested Jewish residents and citizens and sent them to death camps.
After Turk’s only sibling, her older brother, died in 2024, she said she felt compelled to learn more about her father’s side of the family and turned to a DNA testing service called MyHeritage for help.
Last week, Turk met one of her second cousins — 73-year-old Raanan Gidron — over a video call, and the two strangers-turned-family members said they quickly hit it off.
When the two talked, they even learned that Gidron’s father had written at least one letter to Turk’s father years ago, and that Gidron and his family had previously visited the grave of Turk’s grandfather Julian Turk.
Turk said she has “instantly felt welcomed and loved by” Gidron and their extended family and said the experience “changed” her life.
“These people have healed parts of me that no one else could have healed,” Turk said.