A very interesting story can be found on the MyHeritage Blog at: https://tinyurl.com/eaxxw4hk

When Elana Milman was 6 years old, one of the children on the kibbutz where she lived let slip a secret. He said that one of the children in the children’s quarters had parents who were not their real parents. For days, Elana tried to get him to tell her who the adopted child was, and finally he admitted: “It’s you.”

Elana confronted her parents the next day. They took her to her favorite spot on the kibbutz, under a mulberry tree, and told her that it was true: they were not her birth parents, but they were the ones who raised her and loved her.

Elana Milman as a child with her adoptive parents

This answer satisfied her at the time, but as she grew older, she developed more and more curiosity about her birth parents. She pressed her parents for information, but it was only when she was 29 and pregnant with her third child that her adoptive mother finally gave her the first nugget of information: her mother’s name was Franziska Lewinska, and Elana was born in Germany.

In 1978, Elana’s husband Dov traveled to Germany for work and seized the opportunity to discuss Elana’s case with a German lawyer, who offered to help. He was able to locate Elana’s original birth certificate, which said that Elana was born Helena Lewinska to a Polish-Jewish woman, indeed named Franziska Lewinska, at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp in 1947. It also listed her father’s name as Eugeniusz Lewinski.

After meticulous research, Elana was able to track down her birth mother, who had married and changed her name, in Canada. She went to visit and even to live there with her family for a year, and Elana was able to develop a close relationship with her birth mother — then called Franka — before her death in the 1980s. Franka shared with Elana that she had survived the Holocaust by escaping the Warsaw Ghetto and assuming a false identity. But she refused to tell Elana who her father was, and every search Elana tried based on the name on her birth certificate hit a dead end.

“Every time I quizzed my mother — like, what happened to her during the war and who was my father — she gave me different stories,” she told CNN in a recent interview. “When I bugged her too much, she said, ‘The only thing I can tell you is that he was a very good singer and dancer — and very handsome.’”

Elana accepted that she would probably never know who her father was. She wrote an autobiography — later adapted into a historical novel in English called The Secrets My Mother Kept — and after publishing it, she was interviewed in an Israeli magazine. MyHeritage Founder and CEO Gilad Japhet happened to read the article, and he forwarded it to the MyHeritage Research team asking if there was anything they could do to help.

The (shortened) story is that Elana eventually learned more about her father and also that she had a brother, a fact she had never known. Even better, she eventually met her brother and together they visited the grave of their now deceased father,

Elana Milman and her bother, Juliusz Gorzkoś, at their father’s grave

You can read the full story at:  https://tinyurl.com/eaxxw4hk and even watch a video on CNN television at https://tinyurl.com/48cyvmb4.