Dora Rapaport gave birth to a baby girl at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She was cruelly separated from her daughter only a few months later, and eventually each of her immediate family members were killed by the Nazis. Somehow, Dora survived.
After the war, she moved to Austria without knowing the fate of her daughter. Dora met her husband, and the two moved to the US and started a family of their own. As The Washington Post relates, soon she was a mother to daughters Dena and Jean, but she never forgot about her firstborn.
The pair raised their daughters in Canton, Ohio. The Washington Post writes that they didn't speak of their experiences during the Holocaust that often; Dora also encouraged her daughters to make sure they didn't tell people they were Jewish.
Dena told the Post that despite this new life, her mother was never able to forget her first daughter. She took trip after trip to Germany, visiting orphanages and hoping her daughter would be there. As Dena said, "She spent her whole life looking for this child. It affected her mentally really badly."
Their mother died in 1998, but Jean and Dena pledged to continue her search. They ran into block after block, but one day everything suddenly changed. One of them received a notification from DNA testing that they had a genetic match living in Britain. They were curious, but also wary. After all, as far as they knew, all of their mother's family had perished in the war.
The woman on the other end, 53-year-old Clare Reay, was also suspicious. Her mother, Evelyn Reay, had no connection to her biological family. In fact, the only record she had of her birth noted her name was Chava (which is the Hebrew version of Eva) and that she was born at Bergen-Belsen.
Evelyn, or Eva, died in 2004. However, her daughter wanted to reach out to the genetic matches, especially as her mother had spent so much time trying to find out anything about her own family, but to no avail.
As soon as the family members exchanged photos of the mother and daughter, it was clear to everyone involved that they were related. After swapping stories, it was understood just how similar the two women were, despite having lived together for only a few months.
These days, the families have spent hours on Zoom calls and virtually met all of each other's family members. They were finally able to meet in person in November 2021, after following all health-crisis-related guidance.
Dena told the paper, "It was the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. From the moment she stepped in the door, and we hugged her, it was like she belonged."
