Together Again : Separated in WW II Europe, a Brother and Sister Finally Reunite

His last visual memory of his sister was as placid and unremarkable as could be. She was playing with their four younger half-brothers on a large farm in the Sudetenland (now part of Czechoslovakia) where they had hidden from the Russians. He was working in the fields when the Russians hustled him away.

In the 49 years since, Theodor Pawluk and Daria Ivanov have lived separate lives an ocean apart--he in Santa Monica and she in their native Ukraine. For years, they didn’t even know if the other was alive. In 1959, they rediscovered each other and started corresponding, only to stop abruptly when Pawluk sensed that his sister’s letters were being monitored by government officials.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, they revived their correspondence. They exchanged brief, superficial letters and a few awkward phone calls. She could barely speak English, and he could hardly remember his Ukrainian. He sent a photo of himself, his wife, his two children and their dog arrayed in front of their house and car--symbols of his American success. She sent a small black-and-white picture--she was a solemn-looking stranger with a grandchild on her knee.

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But last Saturday, the fading memories and stilted letters were supplanted by a real, live meeting. After a year’s worth of effort, Pawluk had arranged for a visit and bought Ivanov a $1,400 round-trip Aeroflot ticket.

“I hope I recognize her,” Pawluk, 69, fretted the day before her arrival. He even took the photograph with him to the airport and glanced at it periodically as he waited for her flight to arrive.

However, the photograph was taken when she was 43. She’s 64 now. He didn’t recognize her at all, but she recognized him. He wasn’t hard to miss, standing near customs at Los Angeles International Airport flanked by a newspaper photographer and three local television cameras, all there to witness the event.

She started running toward him, and his wife started running toward her. Finally, the brother and sister flung their arms around each other.

As she sat at a table on the shady terrace of Pawluk’s Santa Monica home Thursday, Ivanov laughed at how easy it was to spot her brother. “I could recognize him if he were as far away as that swimming pool,” she said, using her brother as a translator and pointing across Pawluk’s manicured lawn to the glistening pool.

“I thought she would be an old babushka,” Pawluk said, standing next to her. “She has more spunk than I do.”

Ivanov has short, gray hair and startling aqua eyes. Because she neither speaks nor understands much English, she sits quietly composed as people talk around her, smiling a little, staring off to the side as if in contemplation, bare feet crossed at the ankle. Pawluk is shorter than his sister, with brown eyes and a direct glance.

They share an involvement in their respective Seventh-day Adventist churches. Other than that, their lives are virtually unalike.

She is a pensioner who sweeps the streets of her Ukrainian town of Kolomeya for a paltry wage. To buy her $42 visa for the trip, she sold a gold dental crown she had plucked from her mouth. He is a tailor by trade and a retired West Los Angeles awning company owner who has done business with movie stars. He lives in a roomy Santa Monica home now worth probably 30 times what he paid for it in the 1950s.

The fragmentation of their lives began during World War II when the Germans invaded the Ukraine and the Pawluks felt it wise to become German citizens. “My stepmother’s name was Miller, so it could have been German or Jewish,” Pawluk wrote in the beginning of a history for his two grown children. “If we did not register (as Germans), we were afraid that we would all end up in the concentration camp.”

When the Russians came back to the Ukraine, “they thought we were traitors.” So the family fled to Germany. But when the Russians invaded Germany, they fled again to what was then the Sudetenland--only to be captured eventually by the Soviet army in 1945.

Faced with interrogation, Pawluk mastered the art of saying whatever was necessary to survive.

The Russians enlisted him as a spy, and his family continued to live on the farm in the Sudetenland. But within a couple of months, his family was forced apart. He was sent to an army barracks on the Russian-Romanian border. His parents, he believed at the time, were sent to Siberia. He knew nothing of the fate of his siblings.

Eventually, he deserted the Soviet army. But it took him two years on the run to get to the American zone in Germany, and it was only under the sponsorship of the Seventh-day Adventist church that he was able to come to California. “I was Russian enemy, I was American enemy too. . . .”

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For years, he wrote unanswered letters to his family at their old address in the Ukraine. Then, in 1959, the same year that he became a naturalized U.S. citizen, he opened a Seventh-day Adventist Church magazine and saw a picture of his minister from his hometown.

“I thought, ‘If anyone can get in touch with my parents, he can,’ ” Pawluk said.

Instead, he found his sister. Now they have three weeks for a more leisurely reconstruction of their lives.

“We sit over here talking and talking,” said Pawluk cheerfully on Wednesday. “I learn so many things, some of them good, most of them bad.”

Of the four half-brothers, two are alive. His father narrowly escaped hanging by Ukrainian partisans and went to live in Russia. In fact, Pawluk had made an unsuccessful attempt at one point to bring his father to the United States. His father died in 1971. Pawluk’s stepmother died in 1963.

And Daria Ivanov, the long-ago widowed mother of two and grandmother of three, is a newlywed of 10 days. Her new husband is a factory engineer and a member of her church.

“You know, I ask her one question and she talks for half an hour,” said Klara Pawluk, gently chiding her husband’s translation, “and I get three words back.”

Her husband shrugged. “I get to the point!” he said.

Their reacquaintance has involved more than conversation. There have been walks on the Santa Monica beach where Ivanov scoops up stones for souvenirs. And there have been much-needed sorties to department stores. When Ivanov arrived, her shoes were barely patched together.

“I think it’s too much for her to process,” said Klara Pawluk. “I bought her all these clothes, and she wears the same dress every day.”

“She didn’t take a shower until yesterday,” said her brother. “In Russia, they don’t take showers every day.”

Asked how life is in Russia, she gives an answer punctuated by a rueful chuckle. You can catch the word perestroika. “She says they like to say that there will be improvement,” Pawluk said. “Someday, it’s going to be good, but who knows when.”

So, for this visit, her new family will also ply her with trips to Sea World, Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. She brought her swimsuit and has no problems using their pool. She smiled and flashed a thumbs-up approval of this Southern California fixture.

The other ubiquitous feature of Los Angeles life she has yet to understand completely.

“Yesterday, we were driving on the freeway and she said, ‘When do the cars stop?’ ” Pawluk said. “I said there is no end.”