Bergen-Belsen baby solves lifelong mystery after identifying Polish resistance dad

By Stuart Dowell

A Jewish woman who was born in the Bergen-Belsen camp and whose mother escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto has finally solved the life-long riddle of her father’s identity by discovering that he was a hero of the Polish Home Army resistance movement who was injured in the Warsaw Uprising.

In a remarkable quest that spans decades and continents, Elana Milman, who lives in Israel, at the end of March this year finally tracked down her Polish family through a blend of modern DNA technology and traditional genealogical detective work.

Elana found out that not only was her father a Catholic Pole, but she also has a half-brother, 72-year-old Juliusz Gorzkoś from near the town of Sierpc in Poland.

A longed-for first face-to-face meeting was supposed to take place earlier this month in Warsaw but was thwarted by the conflict in the Middle East, which stopped Elana from flying from Tel Aviv.

Elana with her adoptive parents, Huldah and Eliezer Rosenfeld

Elana has spent a lifetime piecing together the puzzle of her parents’ identity after discovering as a child that she was adopted. After tracking down her mother in Canada many years ago, she believed that her life would end without her knowing who her biological father was.

After she spoke about this regret in a media interview promoting her autobiography, researchers from the online genealogy service MyHeritage set themselves the challenge of finding her father.

Using DNA tests, their already abundant database and old-fashioned detective work, they were able to determine that her father was an ethnic Pole named Eugeniusz Gorzkoś, whose wartime experiences led to him being a prisoner of war in Germany.

Eugeniusz Gorzkoś. Photo credit: Warsaw Rising Museum

It was there that his path crossed with Elana’s mother Franciszka in 1947, though the exact location, like many details in this story, will probably never be known.

Elana was a young girl living on a kibbutz in northern Israel when she first found out that she was adopted. “One night, when I was six years old, one of the children in the shared dormitory at the kibbutz said: ‘There is someone in the room whose parents are not their real parents,’” Elana said.

In the next breath, the child pointed to Elana and said, “It’s you.”

Her adoptive parents took her to her favourite place in the kibbutz, a mulberry tree, and told her it was true but they loved her very much.

The curiosity about her birth mother and questions about her blond hair and blue eyes never went away. When she was 29 and pregnant with her third child, she declared to her adoptive mother that she needed to find out who she really was.

Elana aged 14 with her adopted parents on the Merhavia kibbutz

She learned then that her biological mother’s name was Franciszka and that she had been born in Germany. A year later, Elana’s husband Dov, an engineer, did some research in Germany while on a business trip which produced a photograph of Elana’s Red Cross birth certificate.

This showed that her mother’s name was Franciszka Lewińska, and her father’s name was Eugeniusz Lewiński. It later turned out that Lewiński was a false name. Her place of birth was Bergen-Belsen, which by 1947 had become a displaced persons’ camp. Her name on the birth certificate was Helena Lewińska.

It turned out later that Elana had been given up for adoption soon after and in 1949 Franciszka had moved to Israel with her other daughter, who was older than Elana. However, after that, the trail went dead.

A breakthrough came when they struck upon the idea of searching for Franciszka using the maiden name of Sitten, which she had used on the birth certificate.

“We looked for the name in the phone book and reached someone in Jaffa with the same surname who remembered my sister. She said that the family had lived in Haifa and that after three years in Israel, during the severe austerity, the family moved to Montreal, Canada,” Elana said.

After an emotional reunion by telephone, a year later Elana flew to Canada to learn more about her mother’s life. She said that she escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and managed to survive under a false identity. After the war, she came to the displaced persons camp in Bergen-Belsen, where Elana was born.

They were both suffering from dysentery and Elana was taken to the hospital. What happened next is unclear, but a Jewish organisation eventually took her as a candidate for adoption. Years later, when she read her adoption file, she learned that her mother had given her up voluntarily, information that Elana described as “like a knife through the stomach”.

“She escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto just before it closed. She survived until Warsaw’s liberation, probably thanks to the help of Żegota,” she said, referring to the organisation established by the Polish resistance to help Jews. “I think she gave me up for adoption earlier because she wanted me to have a better life,” she explained.

Having established who her biological mother was, Elana’s focus turned to her father. “When I asked her who he was, I got an evasive answer,” she added.

Elana moved to Canada and spent time with her mother, even staying there with her husband after her mother’s death and working as a Hebrew teacher.

Elana Milman at a book fair in Tel Aviv promoting her book

She returned to Israel 13 years ago and started to write her autobiography, which was published with the title When you grow up you will know. In an interview in Israeli media at the time of the launch of the book, she declared, “I haven’t discovered my father’s true identity and I never will.”

Reading this was Gilad Japhet, the head of MyHeritage, an online service that allows users to research and share their family histories. Moved by Elana’s story, he set his head of research Roi Mandel the goal of uncovering the identity of Elana’s father.

“We started with a DNA test that showed that her father was not Jewish but East European. We then used our database and found a match with a woman called Ola Dolińska, with whom Elana shared 2.3% DNA,” Roi said.

This DNA match proved that Ola and Elana shared great grandparents. “We then mapped out all 8 possible sets of great-grandparents and their descendants. We then focused on one branch that had links to Warsaw and looked for a male descendent who lived at the right time, at the right age, in the right area,” Roi added.

“The magic happened when we crossed the nine candidates against Franciszka’s timeline and her location when she got pregnant. One candidate stood out above all others: Eugeniusz Gorzkoś.”

“He met exactly all the criteria in the research. He was in the right place, at the right age and his DNA matched,” Roi said. The researchers soon found Eugeniusz’s displaced persons card and his biography at the Warsaw Uprising museum. The resemblance, especially to Elana’s grandson, was uncanny.

Eugeniusz Gorzkoś was also a displaced person in Germany after the war. Before that, he had served in the clandestine Grey Ranks, was tortured by the Gestapo in Pawiak prison for distributing underground newspapers in Warsaw, and later became a platoon sergeant in the Home Army fighting in the Warsaw Uprising.

During the fighting he was injured in an assault on an anti-aircraft battery the Germans used to fire at British planes dropping supplies to the insurgents. After the fall of the Uprising, he was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp near Stuttgart, and he stayed in Germany until 1949 as a displaced person.

Eugeniusz Gorzkoś ID card

It is not clear exactly where Eugeniusz met and spent time with Franciszka. Stuttgart is several hundred kilometres from Bergen-Belsen. However, it is clear that somewhere in Germany after the war ended their paths crossed.

The final piece in the jigsaw that would close the circle and give Elana the closure she so much desired was to trace her closest living relatives on her father’s side.

A MyHeritage researcher in Poland found out that Eugeniusz had had two children in Poland, Ewa and Juliusz, the latter taking a DNA test that proved that he and Elana were half-brother and -sister.

Juliusz worked his whole life as a veterinarian and at one time served as deputy mayor of the Sierpc district. He recently stood in the local elections to be mayor of Szczutowo in Mazovia, though he was not elected.

Juliusz Gorzkoś – courtesy of Juliusz Gorzkoś

Juliusz said: “I didn’t know too much about my father, because he died 58 years ago, I was still a child. I know only that he fought in the Warsaw Uprising, was wounded in the elbow and was sent to a camp in Germany, which later became part of the British zone.

“The camp in Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the Americans and was turned into a transit camp and there was his father, Eugene, his two brothers. He must have met Franciszka there.”

Although they share no common language, the pair had an emotional first meeting online on Zoom. Elana discovered that not only was there an obvious physical resemblance, there were also other family similarities, including a love of the violin and singing.

Elana and Juliusz are still planning to meet in Warsaw, but they have not yet set a date.

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Main image credit: Warsaw Rising Museum

All images in the article: MyHeritage (unless marked otherwise) 

Stuart Dowell is a freelance journalist based in Warsaw. He writes on Polish culture and history and his articles have appeared in both Poland and the UK