By Corinne Heller
Dec 21 2003
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A brother and sister who were split up as children in Poland and survived the Nazi Holocaust apart have been reunited in Israel after 65 years. Both Shoshana November (73) and Benny Shilon (78) had lived in the Jewish state since 1948 without knowing the other was alive.
November said yesterday's reunion only came about by chance after a friend pushed her to visit Jerusalem's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, last Friday.
She started looking through the archive for her husband's family because she herself "had no one left", but a member of staff came up with the news that Benny was still alive. Shilon had left his details just two weeks earlier in the museum's "Pages of Testimony".
"We jumped on one another and we hugged and kissed and it was hard to talk - it was hard to think," November said of their meeting.
Shilon then found out that one of the photos in the museum was actually of November and he had passed it many times without recognising the young girl staring through the wire fence at Auschwitz, the biggest Nazi death camp.
"I looked for her and my siblings during all the years after the war. In the end it happened like a Hannukah miracle," Shilon added, referring to the eight-day Jewish holiday of the "festival of lights", which began on Friday.
Shilon and November were split up in 1936, when their father left home because of economic crisis. Their mother could not cope with four children and they went to separate orphanages. They met two years later for the last time before yesterday.
In 1942, November was sent to Auschwitz. She said her life was saved by a woman who pushed her out of the line of those waiting to be gassed. Instead she ended up at the adjacent Birkenau work camp.
Shilon had escaped to Russia and volunteered for the Red Army. He even took part in the operation to liberate Auschwitz, but by then his sister had been marched off by the Nazis along with thousands of other prisoners.
She survived when the Nazis surrendered. An estimated six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
"You cannot describe this in words," Shilon said about their reunion. "I grew up alone and I was immune to crying, I didn't know how to. But last night, I cried.
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