The last time Ana Maria Wahrenberg and Betty Grebenschikoff saw each other was when they were 9 years old in a school playground in Germany, aged 9. They were best friends but had to say goodbye because their families had to find ways to escape the Nazis. They thought they would never see each other again.
Betty describes the night before her family left their home. This night is now remembered as Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass). "My sister and I were told by my parents to be very quiet so our neighbours would think we were not at home. While the glass shattered in the streets and our synagogues burned, I finally realised what rampant anti-Semitism meant... that night I understood why my Aryan friends had turned against me, threw stones at me and called me a dirty Jew."
Betty and Anna Maria never stopped searching for each other, though they feared the other had died in the holocaust. Betty made a point of always mentioning Anna-Marie's name during speeches and talks. It took 82 years, but on November 5th Betty and Anna- Maria were reunited by the USC Shoah Foundation which preserves recollections of the holocaust and realised the two stories matched in detail.
When they met after 82 years, Better said, "It felt like coming home... we just had this feeling that we really belonged together. It was like we were never separated."
"We're not the girls we used to be when we were nine, that's for sure, but we kept giggling like we were little kids."
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