Sisters Find Each Other After 81 Years

The children of 95-year-old Rose Gabler went to the tiny Hungarian village of Geirgyle last summer looking for roots--the home where their mother was born, the relatives presumed dead in the Holocaust--and set in motion what they could only describe now as a miracle.

Nine months after her children made the trip to Hungary, Rose was wheeled through the corridors of Los Angeles International Airport where she was reunited Wednesday with her sister, Gizelle Himberger, 88, after being separated for 81 years.

They had trouble communicating at first, but Rose gradually rediscovered her native tongue, telling Gizelle in Hungarian: “My darling sister, I love you. I thought I would never see you again.”

In 1910, when she was 14, Rose’s family sent her to America to earn money so that she could send for her parents and 12 brothers and sisters. But World War I, the Great Depression and World War II intervened, and Rose lost track of her relatives.

She was told they had all died in the Holocaust.

Last August, Rose’s son, Alfred, a physician from Grass Valley, northeast of Sacramento, along with his sister, Beatrice Bennett, and her husband, Ben, of Oceanside, went to the Hungarian town of 600 looking for any relatives who might be alive and for the house where his mother, Rose, was born.

“All the Jews were deported, and none returned,” the occupants told them when they asked about the Weinbergers. Gabler, nonetheless, left his business card.

Two months later, another set of visitors arrived in Geirgyle. Guztav Hamos, a documentary film maker from Germany, showed up with his grandmother, Gizelle Himberger, who lives in Budapest, to shoot part of a film he was making on Hungarian independence as seen through her eyes. At the house where she lived as a girl, the occupants gave them Gabler’s business card.

They told Hamos that Gabler had been looking for the Weinbergers, and that the earlier visitors from America must have been his relatives.

“We were just flabbergasted,” Hamos said at the airport Wednesday.

“We’re still shaking our heads in wonderment,” said Rose’s daughter, Beatrice.

Before making the trip to his mother’s native village last summer, Alfred Gabler had to go to UCLA just to find a map that showed the small community. When he and his sister and brother-in-law arrived, they couldn’t find their mother’s family homestead, but they were able to find his grandmother’s grave in the town cemetery, he said.

While they were in the cemetery, Gabler said, an elderly woman came up and asked: “Oh, you’re looking for the Weinbergers? I used to know them.” She then directed them to the house where their mother had been born.

“The house was exactly as my mother had described it--the flowers, the path leading up to it, everything,” Beatrice Bennett said Wednesday.

When the occupants told them they had never heard of the Weinbergers, Gabler and his sister assumed, as their mother already had, that all of their relatives were dead.

Hamos contacted Gabler, 66, in October, beginning the months of letters and phone calls that led to Wednesday’s reunion.

In his letters and conversations with Hamos, Gabler learned that his aunt, Gizelle Himberger, had escaped the concentration camps because she was married to a Christian.

Gizelle had never given up hope that one day she would find her sister because, after World War I, Rose had sent her money to come to America. She was unable to do so because of U.S. restrictions on immigration from Hungary then, Hamos said Wednesday.

At the airport on Wednesday, Bennett celebrated her birthday and her aunt’s arrival by placing a bouquet of flowers in Gizelle’s arms.

“This is a great birthday present,” she said. “I’m getting an aunt.”

The flight from Budapest to Copenhagen and then on to Los Angeles had left Gizelle--who was making her first trip outside of Hungary--exhausted. The family whisked her quickly out of the airport to a reunion dinner in Van Nuys where Rose lives with her son, Carl, 59, a screenwriter.

Eighty-one years ago, when Rose Gabler arrived in Philadelphia to live with an uncle, she went to work in a garment industry sweatshop sewing buttonholes by hand. Three years later she met Philip Gabler, a Russian immigrant who worked at the same factory, and they were later married. She left the garment factory to raise her four children.

In the 1940s, her son, Jack, now 68, was stationed in California while serving in the military. He said he loved it here, decided to stay and sent for his parents in 1945. Eventually the whole family moved to Los Angeles where Rose’s husband died in 1974.

And on Wednesday, they were joined by relatives they didn’t know were alive until last fall. The newfound family members hugged, kissed and erupted in spontaneous laughter. It was a reunion with very few tears.