More than 80 years ago, two young girls in Germany were separated by the Holocaust. The friends said goodbye and fled for the Nazis. Betty Grebenschikoff and her family moved to Shanghai, China and then the United States. Her friend Annemarie Wahrenberg moves to Chile. The two friends never saw each other again – until a recent, emotional reunion.
Annemarie’s name was changed to Ana María after her family arrived in South America, and it was under that name that she told her story during a webinar for The Latin American Network for the Teaching of the Shoah, according to the USC Shoah Foundation.
One person in the webinar could not help but take notes. It was Ita Gordon, who has been working at the USC Shoah Foundation for almost 25 years. The foundation gathers testimonies from genocide survivors, with a mission to help develop ’empathy, understanding and respect’.
Gordon is used to cataloging and indexing testimonies, but for some reason she could not stop thinking about Wahrenberg’s story.
She searched the foundations’ Visual History Archive for any previous mention of Wahrenberg and found her in someone else’s testimony.
Holocaust survivor Betty Grebenschikoff named a friend, Annemarie Wahrenberg, whom she had not seen since childhood.
“I had one particular girlfriend whose name I always mention, can I mention it here?” Said Betty in her testimony. “Her name was Annemarie Wahrenberg and I never knew what happened to her, and I always wonder if she might be somewhere and she can hear it.”
‘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 to each other and it was very difficult then because our best friends , ‘Grebenschikoff continues. ‘And we would write to each other, but we never did it and I never heard from her again and I do not know what ever happened to her … She probably died in the war, but I’m not certainly not. ‘
Gorgon was not entirely sure whether Grebenschikoff was talking about the same Wahrenberg. Therefore, she reached out to Museo Interactivo Judío de Chile, who arranged the event where she heard Wahrenberg speak.
Both women are now 91 changed their names but also shared many other similarities. They talked in public 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: no woman knew the other one survived.
After Gordon confirms the woman’s identity, she realizes that something big could happen. They can be reunited.
“I was so emotional,” Gordon told the USC Shoah Foundation. ‘I mean, I did not cry or anything, [but] What I did was keep very quiet and say to myself, ‘You may have to act, but feel it now.’ Because there is a chance that two dear friends can be together [again]. “
Rachael Cerrotti / USC Shoah Foundation
Last November, a reunion was coordinated by the foundation. The two women sat down in front of their computers with some of their family members and joined a virtual meeting. First, just the two of them turned on their cameras so the old friends could have a proper reunion with each other.
Grebenschikoff said she had been looking for her friend before. “I could never find her,” she said. “I searched for her in the Holocaust Museum in Washington and in the database I searched for her.”
“And I mention her name every time I give a speech because I’m talking about the Holocaust. And just nothing ever happened, you know? And I just can not believe she’s there. It’s so exciting, she continued.
The friends chatted for two hours, introduced their family members and raised a glass 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 picked up again and talked about random things like a big problem … And it’s almost like language could be an obstacle, but it was absolutely not at all. I had never heard my grandmother speak German before. “
“When Ana María and Betty were spotted on the Zoom call, along with their affluent, healthy and happy families, it was the ultimate triumph over hatred,” another family member said.