Following DNA trails, a Jewish family shattered by the Holocaust discovers its lost branches

For Adrianna Turk, 74, the past was long defined by a profound, unyielding silence. Growing up, family history was not discussed; it was a blank space, a closed door behind which lay the devastating wreckage of the Holocaust.

Her father, originally named Hans before changing it to John when he immigrated to New Zealand, rarely spoke of his origins. Turk’s father had built a new life far from the ashes of Europe, marrying a non-Jewish partner and avoiding Jewish institutions.

“He found himself the blondest ‘Kiwi’ New Zealand lady he could find. She wasn’t Jewish, but she was prepared to convert. My dad said, ‘If there’s another Jew hunt, I want my family left out of it.’” Turk recently told The Jerusalem Post.

What little she knew came in stark, heavy fragments: her paternal grandmother had been murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, and her aunt, uncle, and their two young children were killed in Auschwitz in 1944.

“[My father] never spoke of it, and I never asked,” Turk recalled. “I just knew that his whole family, his mum, sister, brother-in-law, their children, were all murdered.”

For decades, that was where the story ended. It was as if the family tree had been “pruned” by industrial slaughter down to “a single stump.” But years later, after the death of her only sibling, Julian, in Auckland, Turk was struck by an overwhelming wave of grief. Suddenly, she found herself the last surviving member of her immediate family, confronting an immense internal vacuum.

“I felt this hole inside me,” she said, describing the acute isolation that followed. “It was a deep sadness.”

That grief sparked a journey spanning across the globe that would upend everything she thought she knew about her heritage, including the discovery of family members scattered across all corners of the continents.

Ultimately, it brought her to Jerusalem, where she was able to connect with a second cousin she never knew she had: 73-year-old Raanan Gidron.

Putting the missing pieces back together

Reconstructing a family tree decimated by the 20th century’s darkest chapters is no ordinary task. For descendants of survivors, the past is built on missing records, destroyed municipal registries, and relatives whose names survived only as fading memories on yellowed paper.

When Turk decided to take a DNA test, she started by searching online for a platform best suited for tracing European roots. 

“I asked Google: ‘Which is the best for my European heritage?’ I was only looking for Europeans,” Turk recalled.

Turning to MyHeritage for its strong European database, she took the test out of curiosity rather than high expectations.

The results hit her like an earthquake. Instead of a dead end, Turk’s online dashboard lit up with dozens of matches scattered across Germany, Israel, Brazil, and more. The genetic breadcrumbs pointed toward a sprawling network of relatives, more than 50 in total, who had somehow survived the cataclysm and built lives across the globe.

Among her matches were a third cousin from Germany and a second cousin, who happened to be the third cousin’s mother. Because her father had escaped Germany in 1937 with a Jewish-German background, her newly found European relatives naturally carried a German surname.

Initially, Turk could hardly process what she was seeing: “I thought it was a joke. I really could not believe I was looking for Jewish ancestors.”

Treading carefully so as not to cause offense or disrupt what she feared might be an illusion, she reached out.

“I trod very carefully so as not to insult. I really wanted to know how real this was,” she said. After three contact attempts, she finally received a reply.

What followed reshaped her understanding of her family entirely. When the German branch finally responded, Turk remembered thinking they were just “real sweeties,” describing how warmly they embraced her into their lives.

Soon, the messages turned into a busy family WhatsApp group keeping everyone in daily contact. That bond grew even stronger when Renata, her daughter Thea, and little Oliver made the trip to Israel to meet their newly found relatives face-to-face.

For Gidron, watching these visits and chats come together felt nothing short of miraculous for a family line that had been shattered for decades.

“It was like waking up something that was fast asleep,” Gidron reflected. “Suddenly, names on a screen turned into real people sharing coffee, hugging, and building a future together. It’s what keeps us going.”

Tracing branches across continents and oceans

The puzzle pieces of the missing family members began falling into place, revealing a dispersion across the globe that defied the absolute destruction intended by the Nazi regime.

Turk learned that her great-uncle, Max Gusdorf, had been murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp in 1943.

Remarkably, however, other relatives had managed to outlast the war against staggering odds, including Turk’s second cousin Gidron’s mother, who miraculously survived both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.

A direct familial link connecting Turk’s grandmother and Gidron’s grandfather as siblings, tracing back to great-grandparents Moses and Regina, was discovered. Regina came from a family of nine siblings.

Through MyHeritage, Turk’s relatives have successfully mapped multiple surviving branches. The branches of the family tree reached far and wide, reflecting the desperate, fragmented paths of Holocaust survivors seeking refuge wherever the world would open its doors.

One part of the family, for instance, remained in Europe, quietly rebuilding a life amid the ruins of a fractured society. In contrast, others moved across continents, such as to America. At the same time, a third branch daringly made its way to Mandate Palestine long before the establishment of the Jewish state.

Through this intricate web of genealogical discovery, supported and coordinated by MyHeritage representatives like Naama, who helped facilitate their initial meetings and welcomed them into her office, Turk connected with Gidron.

What followed was a profound realization: the family she thought was entirely erased had been thriving across the globe, carrying forward legacies of courage, defense, and renewal.

From The Hague to the Palmach: A legacy of defiance

For Gidron, piecing together the broader family tree also meant reflecting on the extraordinary survival and service of his own father, Reuven (John), and his grandfather, Max.

As the political landscape darkened in Germany, Max recognized the rising threat. After the Nazi Party made significant parliamentary gains in 1932, Max made the fateful decision in 1933 to uproot his family from Germany, moving them across the border to The Hague in Holland.

In Holland, Julian was sent to a specialized agricultural farm at just 15 years old, a program designed to train Jewish youth in farming to prepare them for life in British Mandatory Palestine.

By 1939, at the age of 17, Julian made the difficult choice to illegally immigrate to Mandate Palestine. The parting was bittersweet; Julian left believing his parents would somehow manage, telling them not to worry. Tragically, Max and his wife would not escape the encroaching Nazi Germany horrors and later perished in the camps.

Upon arriving in Mandate Palestine, Julian briefly trained at Deganya, one of the region’s first kibbutzim, before being recruited into the Palmach, the elite underground strike force of the Hagana.

Because he was a native German speaker, Julian was assigned to a specialized German-speaking commando unit. This covert group of roughly 45 men was meticulously trained to infiltrate and counter potential Nazi military advances should German forces push north through Egypt.

Although the British eventually thwarted the German threat to Mandate Palestine, Julian’s service was far from over. Following the end of the war in 1945, he transitioned into the British Brigade.

His unit gathered at the Rehovot railway station, traveling by rail through Egypt to Alexandria, and then by boat to Brindisi, Italy.

From there, they embarked on a massive logistical operation, driving army trucks across the Alps into Switzerland, Holland, Germany, and Poland. Their mission was deeply personal and vital: locating displaced Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust and organizing their covert transport onto ships bound for Israel.

Turning online matches into real family

Going from seeing a list of unfamiliar names on a screen to actually talking to living relatives took a real leap of faith, both Turk and Gidron said.

For Turk, looking at a page full of overseas matches felt completely surreal, a sudden window into a world she never knew she had.

“When you see those matches pop up, it completely changes how you view your place in the world,” Turk reflected on the moment those barriers finally fell away. “Suddenly, you realize you aren’t the end of the line after all.”

For Gidron, receiving inquiries from a newly discovered cousin across the globe brought a profound sense of validation to the history his family had lived through.

“We grew up knowing fragments, but seeing someone reach across the ocean to pick up those pieces changes everything,” Gidron noted. “It bridges the physical and emotional gaps left by history.”

Yet, taking that step meant pushing past very real fears. As someone who did not travel much, the prospect of flying halfway across the world to a country in the middle of a war was terrifying.

“I’m a very untraveled person,” Turk admitted, reflecting on the anxiety of making the trip. “This is something I had to do. Just had to do it.”

Stepping onto a plane meant confronting the uncertainty of a conflict zone, but the pull of finding her family outweighed the danger. Sending that first message months earlier had broken decades of inherited silence, and making the journey to Jerusalem meant finally trading safety behind a screen for the raw, emotional reality of meeting her flesh and blood face-to-face.

Facing old hatreds and modern tensions

Beyond the family trees and DNA tests lies a much heavier burden: what it means to inherit a history of survival in a world that still holds onto old hatreds.

For Gidron, growing up in Israel meant carrying the collective memory of a nation built by survivors, yet the shadow of the past still reaches into the present.

Both cousins have run into that same kind of hostility firsthand. When Turk first reached out to a newly discovered third cousin in Germany who carried a German-Jewish surname, she noticed he was initially uneasy and nervous about being openly linked to his Jewish roots.

Seeing someone still feel the need to hide their identity out of fear struck both of them as a chilling reminder that old dangers have not gone away.

When Turk was getting ready for her trip, she found that some acquaintances suddenly cut ties or turned hostile the moment she mentioned she was heading to Israel. Even though her only reason for going was to finally meet her newly found family, people around her instantly reduced the trip to a political statement.

For Gidron, these modern tensions are a painful echo of hostility he has faced himself. He recalled visiting family in Berlin years ago, when an elderly man sitting outside a coffee house looked right at him and bluntly said, “You’re not wanted here. Go back.”

For both cousins, there is a bitter irony in being told to return to Europe, only to run straight into prejudice once they get there – a stark reminder that the need to watch one’s Jewish back hasn’t disappeared.

Awakening the tree: A new beginning in Jerusalem

For Turk, stepping into this lineage meant embarking on her first visit to Israel, discovering a vast network of family she never knew existed, and anchoring herself directly to her Jewish roots.

Reflecting on the monumental impact of her arrival, Gidron described her with deep affection as the catalyst who awakened the entire family.

“You are a cork opener for the bottle, for this old wine bottle,” Gidron expressed during a meeting they had in Jerusalem. “You are the opener. No man in the family would rise up and say, ‘Hey, we are a family. Let’s get together.’ Turk, thank you. You haven’t just added names to a chart; you brought an open heart and said, ‘Hello, I’m here, let’s hug.’ It’s the aliveness of that tree.”

As Turk prepares to return to her life in Australia carrying the warmth of newfound familial roots in Israel, the journey to her stands as a powerful testament to resilience. What started as a private quest to fill an internal void has transformed into something enduring.

“This isn’t just about looking backward at history,” Gidron noted. “It’s about what we do with this connection now that we have it.”