More than 80 years ago, two young girls from Germany were separated by the Holocaust. Friends said goodbye and ran away from the Nazis. Betty Grebenschikoff and her family moved to Shanghai, China and then to the United States. Her friend Annemarie Wahrenberg moved to Chile. The two friends never saw each other again – until a recent, emotional meeting.
Annemarie’s name was changed to Ana María after her family arrived in South America and, under that name, told her story during a webinar for The Latin American Network for the Teaching of the Shoah, according to the USC Shoah Foundation .
One person at the webinar couldn’t help but take notes. It was Ita Gordon, who worked at the USC Shoah Foundation for almost 25 years. The foundation collects testimonies of genocide survivors, with the mission to help “develop empathy, understanding and respect.”
Gordon is accustomed to cataloging and indexing testimonies, but for some reason he couldn’t stop thinking about Wahrenberg’s story.
He searched the Visual History Archive of the foundations for any previous mention of Wahrenberg and found it in someone else’s testimony.
Betty Grebenschikoff, a Holocaust survivor, mentioned a friend, Annemarie Wahrenberg, whom she had not seen since she was a child.
“I had a certain girlfriend whose name I always mention, can I mention it here?” Betty said in her testimony. “Her name was Annemarie Wahrenberg and I never knew what happened to her and I always wonder if she might be somewhere and hear that.”
“She was my girlfriend when we were very young and we went to school together, we played together and all that, and when we went to China in 1939 we said goodbye to each other and it was very difficult then because we were the ones best friends, “Grebenschikoff continued.” And we were going to write to each other, but we never did and we never heard of her again and I don’t know what ever happened to her … She probably died in the war, but I’m not sure”.
Gorgon wasn’t entirely sure if Grebenschikoff was talking about the same Wahrenberg. So he arrived at the Museo Interactivo Judío de Chile, which organized the event where he heard Wahrenberg speak.
Both women are 91 years old and have changed their names, but have shared many other similarities. They spoke publicly about their experiences of the Holocaust, visited classrooms, and wrote books. Both had unique stories about how their nuclear families remained intact throughout the war.
Another similarity: neither of the women knew that the other had survived.
Once Gordon confirmed the women’s identity, he realized that something great could happen. They could be reunited.
“I was so excited,” Gordon told the USC Shoah Foundation. “I mean, I didn’t cry or anything, [but] what I did was sit very still and say to myself, “You may have to act, but right now, feel it. Because there could be a chance for two dear friends to be together [again]. “
Rachael Cerrotti / USC Shoah Foundation
In November last year, a meeting was coordinated by the foundation. The two women, along with some of their family members, sat down in front of the computers and joined a virtual meeting. First, only the two had the cameras on, so the old friends could have a proper reunion between them.
Grebenschikoff said he had been looking for his friend before. “I could never find her,” she said. “I looked it up at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and I looked it up in the database.”
“And I mention his name every time I have a discussion, because I’m talking about the Holocaust. And nothing happened, you know? And I just can’t believe he’s there. It’s so interesting,” she continued. .
Friends talked for two hours, introduced their family members and raised glasses of champagne – “L’chaim”, a toast to life, the foundation said.
“It was so natural for them,” Grebenschikoff’s nephew Lucas Kirschman told the foundation. “They resumed and talked about random things, like no problem … And it’s almost as if the language could have been a barrier, but it was not at all. I’ve never heard my grandmother speak German before. “
“Seeing Ana María and Betty at Zoom’s call, along with their prosperous, healthy and happy families, was the ultimate triumph of hatred,” said another family member.