At last reunited

BNEI BRAK, Israel — For nearly 60 years, Binyamin Shilon believed his sister was among the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Now he holds her in his arms and cries with joy.

Mr. Shilon, 78, and Shoshana November, 73, were separated from each other and their two brothers in their native Poland during the 1930s. After World War II broke out, Mr. Shilon joined the Soviet army. His sister was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland.

They survived and emigrated separately to Israel, each believing all the rest of the family had been eliminated by the Nazis.

Then on Friday, an American cousin brought Mrs. November to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial authority in Jerusalem, to check the records left by other survivors. The simple check revealed that Mr. Shilon was alive, and just a 90-minute drive from her own house.

That night, she spoke to her brother for the first time since 1938.

“Today, even, I don’t believe it,” Mrs. November said.

Mr. Shilon and Mrs. November are worn by their years, but were still Bronik and Ruja Szlamowicz, their Polish childhood selves, hugging and nuzzling each other.

Their story ignited a media frenzy in Israel, and Mrs. November’s tiny Bnei Brak living room has been filled with visitors for the past few days. The siblings have barely had time to embark on the monumental task of catching up on two remarkable lifetimes.

Mrs. November was a child when her family broke apart, and she spent many of her earliest years in the orphanage of Dr. Janusz Korczak, who would become famous for sacrificing his life rather than abandoning the children under his care in the Warsaw Ghetto.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the children’s father was fatally shot in his home by the Gestapo, and soon she found herself in the Jewish ghetto in Krakow in the care of a stepmother. The little girl escaped the death camps for a time, first by charming a Nazi policeman and then by hiding in the filth of a latrine while the ghetto was liquidated, relatives said.

She nearly died in 1943, when she was sent to Auschwitz and was selected to be gassed. She was saved when a stranger pushed her into the line of those allowed to live.

An estimated 3 million Polish Jews, 90 percent of the country’s prewar Jewish population, were killed in the Holocaust.

She soon found herself back in the care of her stepmother, who she said had become “a bad woman” serving as a nurse in the hospital of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known for his medical experiments on young Jewish twins. She survived the war in work camps.

Mr. Shilon, meanwhile, spent the first years of the war stoking the engines of a riverboat in the Soviet-occupied sector of eastern Poland. Sent to the city of Minsk in 1941 after the Germans bombed his boat, Mr. Shilon was treated for his wounds, then walked through three cities on foot and hopped a train to Siberia.

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