By Caitlin Gibs
on11:05 AM Tuesday May 3, 2016
Abram Belz (left) and his younger brother, Chaim Belzhitsky; Abram last saw Chaim in 1939. Photo: Jess Katz / Washington Post
The five women crowded together around the kitchen table in New Jersey, their eyes fixed on a laptop screen. It was 7 a.m., and none of them had slept well the night before; they were too anxious and excited for this moment. Jess Katz logged into Skype as her mother and three sisters watched.
A face flickered into view: their cousin, the son of a long-missing uncle, the family they thought they had lost forever in the Holocaust.
On the other side of the screen, on the other side of the world, Evgeny Belzhitsky sat with his daughter, his granddaughter and a translator in his home on Sakhalin Island, Russia. The eight family members smiled at each other, speechless. Then, Katz recalls, they all started to cry.
“What do you say to someone you’ve been searching for your whole life?” Katz says.
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