Separated During Holocaust, Cousins Reunite After 52 Years

For years after Flora Singer left war-battered Belgium in 1946, she could not forget the way her little cousin, Henry, had clutched her coat, sobbing, when she told him she would not visit him at the orphanage anymore because she was leaving for America. She had sworn that they would see each other again.

Fifty-two years later, she fulfilled that promise. The two Holocaust survivors were reunited at Los Angeles International Airport during the weekend after the American Red Cross traced Henry’s steps all the way to his home in the San Fernando Valley.

“I kept hoping against all hope,” Henry said at a news conference Sunday at the Red Cross Valley Service Center on Sherman Way.

For him, the reunion was heartwarming even as the pain of the Holocaust remained evident. He did not want his last name published, he said, fearing that his family might be targeted by anti-Semites.

As Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Belgium, the two cousins were hidden separately in apartments, orphanages and convents across the country. Most of their family was wiped out in Auschwitz, perhaps the most infamous of the Nazi concentration camps, and after all this time, both were losing hope that they would ever find any surviving relatives.

After they said goodbye in 1946, Singer started a life in New York. As Henry’s caretakers moved him around quickly in the postwar chaos, she lost track of him. He was eventually adopted by a Jewish family in San Francisco, who had sent a relative in Europe initially to comb the orphanages for a young girl, he said.

Singer, 67, now a retired teacher who volunteers at the national Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., had made several trips to Belgium and followed leads she picked up through other survivors, but recently began having her doubts about finding Henry. Her family told her that her cousin had probably died. Still, she clung to her hopes.

She said it was ironic that the Red Cross, which recently has come under fire for failing to help many Jewish refugees during World War II, reunited her with Henry. Researchers say the wartime president of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross was a profiteer who owned two factories in Nazi Germany.

But Singer praised those who helped her find her cousin.

“The generation working for the Red Cross now is not the generation working for the Red Cross then,” she said.

On Dec. 31, Henry received a phone call from Red Cross Tracing Services, which had been searching for him for seven years. The caller said he had a long-lost cousin who survived the Holocaust.

“I was so blown away it was hard to think,” said Henry, now a music producer.

He passed along his phone number to the Red Cross, who notified Singer in the Washington area. She arranged to fly to Los Angeles on Friday, and they saw each other at the airport for the first time in five decades. At Sunday’s news conference they held hands for two hours without letting go, vowing never to lose touch again.

The cousins now plan to introduce their families to one another and visit as frequently as possible.

“There’s a heritage,” Henry said. “There wasn’t before.”