Siblings Separated During WWII Reunited 66 Years Later

During World War II, Ukranian siblings were sent separately to Nazi labor camps. Against the odds, they both survived - and 66 years later, they've finally found each other again.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on July 14 2008

In 1942, 17-year-old Irene Famulak gave her 7-year-old brother a hug and kiss goodbye. “He pushed me away,” she recalled years later to CNN. “I asked, ‘Why did you do that?’ And he said that he doesn’t like kisses.”

If the young boy, Wssewolod Galezkij, had known what the coming years had in store, he would have held on to his sister as long as he could. She was being sent to a German labor camp - supposedly for just six months. But, as with many Holocaust survivors, “it was, of course, much longer,” Famulak said. “I was there for years.”

Soon after, Galezkij himself was sent to a labor camp in Germany. After the war ended, the weak young man found his way home to the Ukraine, but no one was there to greet him. He has no idea what became of his parents. Some of his siblings died during the war; others are still missing. But Galezkij never gave up hope of finding his favorite sister, Irene.

Galezkij tried to track down information about her for years, but was thwarted by Soviet privacy laws until reforms in the 1980s made such information accessible to the general public. Galezkij then asked the American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center for aid in finding out if his sister was still alive. The organization’s 100 volunteers began looking into his case, but such work is like “looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Linda Klein, the group’s director. It seemed that Galezkij, now 73, would never be reunited with her.

But this year, the Red Cross group made a discovery: Irene Famulak, now 83, was living in Philadelphia. “When the Red Cross told me they had found her in America, it was such a joy,” Galezkij said. He was so overcome with emotion that he had to be taken to the hospital for treatment.

As soon as the Red Cross contacted Famulak, she boarded a plane to her long-ago home in Donetsk, Ukraine, to give her brother another long-awaited hug. Galezkij, his wife, and their neighbors served a huge dinner to welcome his sister, while he told her about all the time he’d spent waiting for her, hoping he might see her face again.

“He says he always thought he’d see me someday. He dreamt lots about me,” Famulak said. “And he wrote a song for me. When he went to sleep, he sang every night and cried.”

Galezkij was overjoyed by the belated reunion with his long-lost sister. “I don’t believe anyone has ever known such happiness. Now, I truly believe I can die satisfied,” he said.

Filed under: General Interest, Weird,

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