A brother and sister who were separated in the Holocaust and thought each other dead were reunited yesterday after 65 years. They found each other by searching through Yad Vashem's Central Database of Holocaust Victims' names.

Hilda Shlick believed her parents and five siblings had perished in the Holocaust. When she and her elder sister Berta escaped from Czernowitz, they concealed their family name, Glasberg, and never used it again.

A few months ago Hilda's grandsons, Benny and David Shlick, found out accidentally that their grandmother's earlier name was Glasberg. David searched Yad Vashem's name data base on the Internet and was amazed to discover a page on his grandmother's name among the list of Holocaust victims.

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After a month of searching, with the help of various organizations, he tracked down his grandmother's brother and the rest of the family's descendants in Canada.

The grandsons found out that Hilda's parents and four of her siblings had been living in Canada. Her parents and two of her brothers had died over the years. The two surviving brother are Mark, 83, and Simon, 81.

Hilda's long lost brother Simon flew in from Canada at the end of last week, accompanied by other relatives, to meet Hilda. The dramatic reunion at Ben Gurion Airport was fraught with emotion and tears. Yesterday Yad Vashem hosted the two and their families and released their story.

Simon, who did not let go of his sister's hand, occasionally kissing her on the cheek, related fragments of how he was saved from the Nazis. Hilda, more reserved, is planning to visit Mark, her sick brother in Montreal in a month, and meet many of her nieces and nephews, whom she did not know existed until recently.

She will also visit the grave of her parents, Henia and Ben Zion Glasberg, who lived to the age of 98 and 92 and died in Montreal in the 1980s.

Benny Shlick said he had a sense of deep satisfaction, but also of regret for all the lost years in which Hilda did not know that her parents and siblings were alive and living in Canada.

Hilda Glasberg was born in 1931 in Czernowitz, Bukovina (Romania) and had four brothers and two sisters. In 1941, when the Nazis invaded Bukovina, the family in Czernowitz split. Hilda, her sister Berta and Berta's two children fled to Uzbekistan in the Soviet Union. The rest remained in Romania.

Berta, who was much older, presented Hilda as her daughter. Berta's husband, an officer in the Red Army, remained in Romania and was killed in the war. Berta then married a Jew from Estonia and moved there with Hilda after the war. She died in 1970.

Hilda married Eliya Yizthok Shlick and they had two children. In 1998, she immigrated to Israel to join her son Zali. After the Second World War, some of Hilda's siblings moved to Israel. Simon served in the Israel Defense Forces during the War of Independence, but later moved to Canada, to join his older brother.