Good Lifestyle

In 1939, 14 years oldGERT BERLINER Had to say goodbye to his parents while he climbed a train from Berlin to Sweden. At that time, the options for Jews hope to escape Nazi Germany had virtually disappeared. One of the very rare possibilities remaining wasKinderTransport-A rescue effort led by Jewish and Quakes organizations that have passed children out of the country. The mission covered has helped thousands of children escape and gert was one of them. But only children have been allowed in trains. And so, the young boy agitated goodbye to the only parents he knew, armed with a bag that can adapt to a little more than a little stuffed monkey.

His parents were sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered on May 17, 1943.

Berliner was taken away from a kind host family in Sweden and moved to the United States after the war. Orphanède and completely alone, he brought the monkey toy with him.

He grew up and worked as a photographer and artist, traveled widely and took the monkey toy with him wherever he went. He married and had a son, Uri, who,In a nice room for NPR, wrote: "It was a distant father. And I was a distant son, much of our time together with uncomfortable silences." Gert rarely talked about his first life, his parents, and most of the adult life of Uri, he believed "there were only three Berlin: my father, my son, Ben."

Then, in 2003,Aubrey Pomerance, An archivist of the Jewish Museum of Berlin, asked his father if he could give a gift from his childhood that the museum's visitors could have relate personally. He gave him the toy monkey and it came back to Berlin. For many years, the monkey sat in the museum.

In 2015, a woman namedErika PettersonVisited the museum and saw the monkey and a picture of a little boy named Gert Berliner. What coincidence, she thought. His mother's last name was also Berliner. It turns out that Gert's father had a brother, whose children had also managed to escape in Sweden. But they are not out ofKinderTransport;Instead, they were sent to work on farms in remote areas of the campaign. Although they are cousins ​​living in the same country at a time, they knew nothing of another existence.

But that changed everything, thanks to the toy monkey.

URI has recently traveled to Sweden to meet with its family members lost for a long time, and has written that "even if we have just met, it felt well to be around my new parents. To be part of a family more Numerous - a family that has not only survived, but has grown up and flourished. "

As for Gert, which is now 95 years old, it is grateful.

"It's a gift," he said. "In my old age, I discovered that I have a family."

And it's nice to know that he had not had trouble all these years, when he believed that the plush monkey was a magical talisman that would bring him up with his family one day.

"Suddenly because of the monkey, I have a phone call, someone in Sweden of all the places, saying, well I think you are my cousin," he said.

The story has become viral and, needless to say that everyone is crying.

The world can be a very cruel place, but it can also be magic. And for another incredible story, read how social media have helped a woman to go fromDo not have a family to be a girl, a granddaughter, a sister and a aunt.

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