ALMOST eight decades after two brothers were separated during the Holocaust, their families have reunited from opposite sides of the world.

    Abram Belz helped his younger brother Chaim Belhitzky escape into the Soviet Union from Poland in 1939 — and never saw him again.

    Their mother had begged both her sons to save themselves, but as the older sibling, Belz remained with his family.

    Their entire family had been forced into the Piotrknow Trybunalski ghetto along with thousands of other Polish Jews that year. Although the pair never stopped looking for each other, neither lived to see their families reconnect after 77 years last month.

    The reunion was orchestrated by Belz’s granddaughter Jess Katz, who did some digging online and used genealogy site JewishGen.org to find her relatives.

    On April 20, the families of the two brothers — one in New Jersey and the other in Russia — were in tears as they spoke on Skype for the first time.

    “I used to stare into my grandpa’s deep blue eyes and wonder about the kind of pain and suffering he must have seen,” Katz wrote in a blog post.

    “His wrinkled eyes would instantly become those of a 19-year-old boy as he cried to me and told me about his parents who were gassed to death, his sister who was killed in the ghetto and his brother who escaped to Russia and was never found again.”

    The family knew that Chaim had made it to the Soviet Union, after fleeing the ghetto, Katz told the Washington Post, because he sent letters. But then the letters stopped coming.

    Belz had remained in the Polish ghetto with more than 60 relatives — but by the war’s end, he and one of his cousins were the only survivors, according to the Post.

    He described what happened after his brother escape in his own words for a testimonial for Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation Project. “Less than a year after we moved into the ghetto, my grandfather dropped dead in the house,” he said.

    “Two weeks later, my 24-year-old sister died of tuberculosis. My uncle who was 26 years old was shot, his wife and baby were sent to Treblinka where they were gassed to death by the Nazis.

    “The rest of my family was exterminated. My parents were sent to Treblinka and were killed in the gas chambers.”

    Belz was liberated from the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1945, he relocated to a refugee camp in Italy and eventually immigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, New York.

    Then, he began his quest to find out the fate of his lost brother. He wrote to Polish Government and sought help from organizations that aimed to reunite Holocaust survivors with their families – to no avail.

    But despite Belz spending decades searching for his long-lost brother, it took his granddaughter, who works for a software company in New York City, just two weeks to find their long-lost relatives.(SD-Agencies)