Growing up in New Zealand, Adriana Turk always thought she was the last surviving member of a family wiped out during the Holocaust. But now, she is in Israel meeting long-lost relatives for the first time, after a MyHeritage DNA test led to a surprising revelation last year.

Discovering that she has over 50 living relatives across Germany, Israel, and Brazil was “absolutely astonishing,” the 74-year-old Turk told The Times of Israel in a call from the Tel Aviv home of her newly found third cousin, Raanan Gidron. “This has been such a revelation for me.”

Turk’s father John (Hans) Turk, a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany for New Zealand in 1937, rarely spoke about his past. After the war, he learned that his mother was murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, while his sister, her husband, and their two young children were killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

Upon arriving in New Zealand, the elder Turk worked hard to blend into his new country and kept almost no trace of the world he had fled. He changed his name from Hans to John, married a non-Jewish New Zealander, and rarely associated with Jewish institutions.

“He never spoke of it, and I never asked,” Turk said. “I just knew that his whole family — his mum, sister, brother-in-law, their children — were all murdered.”

But after her only sibling, Julian, died in Auckland in late 2024, Turk was overcome with sorrow at the realization that she was the last surviving member of her immediate family.

“I felt this hole inside me,” she said. “It was a deep sadness.”

In the months that........

© The Times of Israel