“I was adopted and spent years searching for my birth parents. Then I discovered a whole new family”

The first time I heard that my parents were not biologically related to me, I was six years old. It was 1953, and I was living on a kibbutz in Israel. A classmate told me in a whisper that his parents had divulged a secret. “There is a child in this room whose parents are not their parents,” he said. I pressed him, somehow certain that it was me. Finally, he confessed that it was.

When I confronted my parents, they took me to my favourite place, a big mulberry tree, and told me the truth: “We didn’t give birth to you, but we are your parents, and we are going to love you until the end of the world.” I loved my adoptive parents, but I developed an intense drive to learn as much as I could about my identity. When I was 10, I approached a woman on the street who looked like me and asked, “Did you lose a girl?” She gave me an odd look, which taught me that you shouldn’t ask strangers questions like that.

The mystery of my origins were always at the back of my mind, but I continued to live my life. I got married in 1967 to my husband, Dov, and had four children. I taught music, dance and creative expression at the kibbutz—I’d always had a knack for singing and performing.

When I was pregnant with my third child, I thought about how I didn’t know anything about my genetic history or that of my children. That day, I asked my adoptive mother again about where I came from. In a trembling voice, she told me what she knew: my mother’s name was Franziska Lewinska, and I was born in Germany. I was shocked to learn concrete details after so many years of wondering. But there was still so much I didn’t know.

My husband told a business acquaintance, a lawyer, about my plight—that I felt incomplete, as if there were pieces of me missing—and he was so moved that he wrote to the International Tracing Service, which documents the victims of Nazi persecution and their families, and managed to get a copy of my birth certificate. It confirmed my mother’s name and listed her maiden name as Syten and my father’s name as Eugeniusz Lewinsky. Dov and I tried looking for my mother, but we couldn’t find a record of her in Israel. She didn’t appear to have been part of the wave of immigration from Germany after the war. While we searched, I put in a request to open my adoption file.

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One of my relatives looked up my mother’s maiden name in the phone book, prepared to call everyone listed. Incredibly, the first person he reached was a relative of hers. We learned that my mother was living in Montreal and that she had two more children—my half-brother and half-sister, Mike and Diane.

When my mother learned that I was looking for her, she called me right away. “I can’t tell you how excited I am that you found me,” she said. “I’ve been waiting so many years.” A few months later, in 1979, I flew to Montreal to meet her. I was 32 and she was 61. She asked me to wave a white handkerchief in the air when I arrived. “I’m not very tall, so I’ll know it’s you,” she said. At the airport, I saw a little woman with a face that resembled mine. I went up to her and said, “Here I am.” Surprised and delighted, she put her hands on my shoulders.

We made small talk on the drive to her house, trying to skirt what felt too raw to touch right away. I stared out the window, seeing trees covered in snow for the first time. There was only one thing I really wanted to know: Why did she give me away? Eventually, my mother started opening up. She told me that she hadn’t wanted to put me up for adoption. She said I’d been taken by Aliyat Hanoar, an organization that rescued Jewish children in Germany and resettled them in what would become Israel after the war. But this, I later learned, wasn’t the whole story.

For the next three weeks, I asked her about her life. I bought a small tape recorder, and with her permission, I recorded her. I also wrote everything down in a diary, wanting to remember it all. On that trip, I had the chance to visit my half-siblings in New York. It was incredible. Diane and I bonded over a conversation about environmental versus genetic inheritance, and Mike and I established a wonderful relationship that is still strong today.

I learned that, when the Germans began bombing Warsaw, my mother’s first husband got them fake ID cards that allowed them to escape the Jewish ghetto just before it was sealed in 1940—no one in, no one out. She remembered the day the Germans burned the ghetto, in 1943, after the Jewish uprising. She had to pretend to cheer on the death and destruction.

A non-Jewish man sheltered her in Germany during the war, and she became pregnant with my sister, Diane. After the war, she and Diane went to a displaced persons camp near the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to find whoever was left of her family. She ended up staying for two years. When I asked, she told me she wasn’t sure who my father was, just that I was born at the camp in 1947. I didn’t probe; I just let her tell me what she was willing to share.

In 1980, I finally received a letter inviting me to open my adoption file. Inside, I found my mother’s letter of consent to give me away. I burst into tears. How could she have lied to me, and why did she abandon me? I didn’t know how to confront her. If I told her what I’d found, I would be calling her a liar. I might lose her and our new relationship. Ultimately, I decided not to confront my mother. I still don’t know for sure why she gave me up, and I guess I never will. I’m not interested in theorizing—it’s a question that only she could answer. It was more important to me not to hurt her, to hold on to her for as long as I could.

My mother and I kept in close contact until her death in 1986. I even moved to Montreal for a year in 1981 to spend time with her. Two years after her death, Dov and I moved our family to Toronto. After a lifetime on the kibbutz, we wanted to try a new way of life. We lived in North York, and I taught Hebrew at the Bialik Hebrew Day School for twenty years, through the 1990s and early 2000s.

In 2017, I decided to write a book. I wanted to record my family’s history and share our experience. But I still didn’t have a major piece of the puzzle: my father’s identity. In 2021, I took a DNA test with the Israeli company MyHeritage, but it didn’t yield any substantial matches. Two years later, the CEO of the company, Gilad Japhet, read my book when it was published in Hebrew. The lead researcher at MyHeritage reached out to tell me they were moved by my story and were going to try to find my father. I was thrilled. Somehow, I knew they would succeed.

This past March, I got the news I’d been waiting for. The lead researcher told me and Dov what they’d found, starting with a woman named Ola Dolinski. Through her, they were able to narrow the search down to two men: one was Eugeniusz Gorzkoś, born in Warsaw in 1921. After fighting in the Polish uprising against the Nazis, he was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. He and my mother likely met in the spring of 1946, before she entered the displaced persons camp. He died in 1966, at the age of 45. It turned out Lewinsky was just a name my mother had come up with for my birth certificate.

That wasn’t the only surprise. The researchers also connected me with my half-brother, Juliusz, in Poland. I learned that my father had been a great singer, like me, and a virtuoso violinist. A major piece of my identity clicked into place. In May, I flew to Warsaw to meet my brother. At the airport, I saw him from a distance and called out his name. We hugged and kissed. I was trembling with disbelief; it was like a scene from a movie.

We drove to the graves of our father and grandparents and to our father’s childhood home in suburban Warsaw, not far from where my mother grew up. As I walked around the garden, I felt an incredible connection to the land. I’m walking on the same ground as my ancestors, I thought. I felt like I was coming home, to a place I’d belonged to even before I was born.

I am the descendant of a Jewish Polish mother—a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who hid from the Nazis to survive—and a Catholic Polish father, who was wounded and captured on the first day of the Polish uprising against the Nazis. My parents paid for these experiences with loss and agony. But I am here to tell their story.