More than 80 years ago, two girls in Germany were separated by the Holocaust. Friends said goodbye and fled 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 and exciting meeting.
Annemarie’s name was changed to Ana María after her family arrived in South America, and it was with that name that she told her story during a webinar for the Shoah Latin American Teaching Network, according to the USC Foundation Shoah.
A person at the webinar could not help taking notes. It was Ita Gordon, who has worked at the USC Shoah Foundation for almost 25 years. The foundation collects testimonies from survivors of the genocide, with a mission to help “develop empathy, understanding and respect”.
Gordon is used to cataloging and indexing testimonies, but for some reason she couldn’t stop thinking about Wahrenberg’s story.
She searched the Foundation’s Visual History Archive for any previous mention of Wahrenberg and found it in someone else’s testimony.
Holocaust survivor Betty Grebenschikoff mentioned a friend, Annemarie Wahrenberg, whom she had not seen since she was a girl.
“I had a girlfriend in particular whose name I always mention, can I mention you here?” Betty said in her testimony. “Her name was Annemarie Wahrenberg and I never knew what happened to her and I am always wondering if she is anywhere and can hear that.”
“She was my girlfriend when I was very young and we went to school together, and we played together and all that, and when we left for China in 1939 we said goodbye and it was very difficult because we were best friends,” continued Grebenschikoff. “And we were going to write to each other, but we never did and I never heard from her again and I don’t know what happened to her … She probably died in the war, but I’m not sure.”
Gorgon was not sure if Grebenschikoff was talking about the same Wahrenberg. So she went to the Museo Interactivo Judío de Chile, which organized the event where she heard Wahrenberg speak.
Both women are now 91 and have changed their names, but they also share many other similarities. They spoke publicly about their Holocaust experiences, visited classrooms and wrote books. Both had unique stories about how their nuclear families remained intact during the war.
Another similarity: none of the women knew that the other had survived.
As soon as Gordon confirmed the identity of the women, she realized that something big could happen. They could be brought together.
“I was so touched,” Gordon told the USC Shoah Foundation. “I mean, I didn’t cry or anything, [but] what I did was to be very quiet and say to myself, ‘You may have to act, but now, feel it.’ Because there may be a chance that two dear friends can be together [again]. “
Rachael Cerrotti / USC Shoah Foundation
Last November, a meeting was coordinated by the foundation. The two women, along with some of their family members, sat down at their computers and participated in a virtual meeting. First, only the two had their cameras on, so that old friends could have a proper meeting with each other.
Grebenschikoff said he had looked for his friend before. “I was never able to find her,” she said. “I looked for it at the Holocaust Museum in Washington and in the database I looked for it.”
“And I mention her name every time I give a talk, because I talk about the Holocaust. And it just didn’t happen, you know? And I just can’t believe that it is there. It’s so exciting, ”she continued.
Friends chatted for two hours, introduced their families and raised glasses of champagne – “L’chaim”, a toast to life, the foundation said.
“It was so natural for them,” Grebenschikoff’s grandson, Lucas Kirschman, told the foundation. “They came back and were talking about random things as if nothing was too much … And it’s almost as if the language could have been a barrier, but it absolutely wasn’t. I never heard my grandmother speak German before.”
“Seeing Ana María and Betty on the Zoom call, together with their prosperous, healthy and happy families, was the final triumph over hatred,” said another family member.