First published October 20, 2019.
In September 2019, two Jewish cousins from Romania, Morris Sana and Simon Mairowitz, met in a Tel Aviv hotel room for the first time since they were children. Each had spent roughly 75 years believing the other had been killed during the Holocaust. Sana, then 87, lived in Ra'anana in Israel; Mairowitz, 85, had built his life in the United Kingdom. They found each other because Sana's daughter began searching online and made contact with relatives through Facebook. A video of their meeting, filmed by Sana's granddaughter, was watched around the world.
Here is how the reunion came about, what the cousins lived through in wartime Romania, and what families still searching for lost relatives can learn from it.
Childhood friends torn apart by war
Morris and Simon grew up close, as cousins and as friends, in Romania in the 1930s. Their childhood ended as the country lurched toward fascism. In September 1940 the antisemitic Iron Guard joined a new "National Legionary" government led by General Ion Antonescu, and Romania soon aligned itself with Nazi Germany. Attacks on Jews increased almost at once.
Some retellings of the story say Germany invaded Romania in 1940. That is not quite right. Romania was not conquered; its own government chose the Axis side, and German troops arrived as allies. In June 1941 Romania joined Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union.
The two boys escaped separately and lost touch. In the years that followed, each came to believe the other had died in a Nazi camp. With no news, no addresses and borders closing across Europe, that assumption was tragically reasonable.
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The Holocaust in Romania
The fear that kept each cousin from searching was grounded in terrible reality. Most historical estimates put the number of Jews killed in Romania and in Soviet territory under Romanian control at between 250,000 and 380,000, a large share of them murdered by Romanian forces rather than German ones.
The violence took many forms. In the Iași pogrom of late June 1941, soldiers, police and mobs killed thousands of Jews in the city, and many survivors died in sealed "death trains". Tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were deported to Transnistria, a region between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers, where ghettos and camps saw mass deaths from hunger, disease and shootings. In Hungarian-ruled Northern Transylvania, around 132,000 Jews were deported and killed with the collaboration of Hungarian authorities.
Against that background, two boys who disappeared from each other's lives in 1940 had every reason to fear the worst. Many families never learned what happened to their relatives at all.
How a Facebook search found a lost cousin
After the war, Morris settled in Israel and Simon in Britain. Decades passed. The breakthrough came not from an archive but from social media. Morris's daughter started looking for relatives online and connected with family members on Facebook. Through those conversations she realised Simon was alive, and she put the two men in touch.
The cousins then arranged to meet. Simon travelled to Israel, and the reunion took place in a Tel Aviv hotel room in the last week of September 2019. Sana's granddaughter, Leetal Ofer, filmed it and shared the video on Facebook, calling it one of the most moving things she had ever seen.
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The moment they met
In the video, Morris walks into the room, sees Simon and opens his arms, smiling through tears. According to the Jewish Chronicle, he seemed to recognise his old friend before Simon recognised him. Family members can be heard crying as the two men embrace, then sit down side by side.
Simon's words were simple. "Seventy-five years you waited… It's a long time. But we've got each other now," he told his cousin, as quoted by the Jewish Chronicle. The two men went on to talk about their lives and the years they had lost.
What makes the clip so powerful is how ordinary it looks: two elderly men in a hotel room, surrounded by family. Behind that ordinariness lie three-quarters of a century of grief, assumption and silence.
Why so many families lost track of each other
Morris and Simon are among many Holocaust survivors who found relatives decades after the war. Several things made those searches so hard:
- Destroyed records. Whole communities, along with their registers and synagogue archives, were wiped out.
- Changed names. Many survivors adopted new names to hide their identity during the war, to fit into new countries, or on arrival in Israel, which broke paper trails.
- Scattered migration. Survivors ended up in Israel, Britain, the Americas, Australia and elsewhere, often after years in displaced persons camps.
- Silence. Many survivors spoke little about the past, so younger relatives did not know whom to look for.
Tips for anyone searching for relatives today
Social media can open a door, as it did here, but it works best alongside careful records. If you are trying to trace family separated by the Holocaust or other displacement, a few steps help:
- Write down every spelling of family names you know, along with towns, dates of birth and the names of siblings and parents.
- Check the major Holocaust databases, such as Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, the Arolsen Archives and the tracing services of national Red Cross societies.
- Ask older relatives now, and record their memories, even if they seem fragmentary.
- When you find a possible match online, confirm it with documents or shared family details before arranging a meeting.
The reunion of Morris Sana and Simon Mairowitz is a reminder that some searches do end in an embrace, even after 75 years. It is also a reminder of the millions of families for whom no such meeting was ever possible, and of why remembering the Holocaust accurately still matters.
Sources: Reunion video filmed by Leetal Ofer; The Jewish Chronicle: Shoah survivor cousins meet after 75 years; JTA via The Times of Israel: Holocaust survivors reunited in Israel after 75 years; Wikipedia: The Holocaust in Romania.
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