By Zev Stub on the Australian Jewish News…
Adriana Turk, who grew up in New Zealand, believed she was the last surviving member of her bloodline. Then a DNA test found she has 50 relatives.
Growing up in New Zealand, Adriana Turk [pictured] always thought she was the last surviving member of a family wiped out during the Holocaust. But now, she is in Israel meeting long-lost relatives for the first time, after a MyHeritage DNA test led to a surprising revelation last year.
Discovering that she has over 50 living relatives across Germany, Israel and Brazil was “absolutely astonishing”, the 74-year-old Turk told The Times of Israel in a call from the Tel Aviv home of her newly found second cousin, Raanan Gidron.
“This has been such a revelation for me.”
Turk’s father John (Hans) Turk, a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany for New Zealand in 1937, rarely spoke about his past. After the war, he learned that his mother was murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, while his sister, her husband, and their two young children were killed at Auschwitz in 1944.
Read the full story on Australian Jewish News HERE.
