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Bad Arolsen, Germany (dpa) - Two sisters who survived five years in Nazi concentration camps, only to be separated in the chaos of 1945 and end up in two different countries, have been reunited after Red Cross investigators discovered they were related.
Regine Boehmer, imprisoned at age 8 with the rest of her family because they were gypsies, thought her younger sister Erika was dead.
But the investigators tracked down Erika Hrasova in the Czech Republic and broke the news to her that she had relations in Germany.
The experts said it was too long ago to establish why Erika, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis at the age of 4, had been separated from the rest of her family when British troops liberated starving inmates from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in May 1945.
"I recognized her straight away," said Hrasova on Tuesday in Bad Arolsen, where the Red Cross international tracing service uses a vast library of World War II documents to track down lost people.
"The eyes. The mouth. I knew at once she was my sister," said the elder, Boehmer. The delighted sisters said Hrasova plans to move to Hamburg so they can spend their last years together.
The younger sister only speaks Czech and the elder German, but Boehmer said, "Since we met up again at the weekend, we've chatted the whole time. I don't know how, but somehow it has worked."
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
