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A Survivor Looks for His Lost Twin on Facebook

Menachem Bodner last saw his brother at Auschwitz when he was 4

by
Adam Chandler
March 12, 2013

While mired in the shiny vanity of a technology parade, I came across this unbelievable story, which chronicles a Facebook campaign by an Israeli Holocaust survivor named Menachem Bodner to locate his lost twin brother.

Bodner was too young to remember his experiences in Dr. Josef Mengele’s facilities as well as to recall that he had a twin brother at all. According to the story, Bodner was only guided by a sense of certainty that he was a twin.

Until last May, Bodner didn’t even know that his own name was once Elias Gottesmann. Now he knows that. And he knows for certain that he has a twin—thanks to the Nazis’ dogged, pathological documentation of their crimes. Ayana KimRon, a professional genealogist in Israel, found the evidence, clearly written in a record put together by the organization Candles, of twins who were “identified as having been liberated at Auschwitz or from a subcamp”:



A-7733, Gottesmann, Elias, 4
A-7734, Gottesmann, Jeno, 4



KimRon got onto the case after spotting a posting made on a genealogical forum by a cousin of Bodner’s partner, seeking information about the long-missing brother. When the woman was unable to answer KimRon’s questions, Bodner ended up calling the curious researcher himself. “I was hooked,” KimRon says of that first call. “I said, ‘Look I’m going all the way with you,’ and it turned out to be the project of my life.” Bodner, a retired Israeli tax-service employee living in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon LeZion, was dubious at first, but KimRon began digging anyway. She asked him if he had any sense of his brother, and he told her, “All my life I’ve known that he was alive somewhere; I felt that he was alive.”

Backing him in the search are a million Facebook users. It’s a pretty amazing story.

Adam Chandler was previously a staff writer at Tablet. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate, Esquire, New York, and elsewhere. He tweets @allmychandler.