Separated at Birth

Jack Yufe and Oskar Stohr first met in Germany when they were 21 years old. They were both sporting the same suit and wire-rimmed glasses, and even wore the same mustache and receding hairline. They looked alike—identical, actually—because they were. Yufe and Stohr were identical twins. And yet they did not like each another very much, beginning with their first meeting in 1954. In fact, they lived very different lives perhaps best communicated by the fact that Yufe was raised Jewish while Stohr was a member of the Hitler Youth. Stohr died of lung cancer in 1997; Yufe died on Monday from stomach cancer at the age of 82, reported The Los Angeles Times.

Yufe and Stohr were born in Trinidad in January, 1933. Six months later their parents split up. Yufe remained in Trinidad with his father and Stohr went to Germany with his Catholic mother:

Stohr grew up as the Nazis rose to power. Like his fellow students, he greeted the school principal with “Heil, Hitler,” and was warned by his grandmother to never let on that his father, Joseph, was Jewish. As an act of survival, Oskar joined the Hitler Youth movement.



Years later, he confessed that he had dreamed that he shot down his twin in an aerial dogfight. Jack had a similar nightmare about killing Oskar with a bayonet.

Meanwhile, Yufe moved to Venezuels when he was a teenager and lived with his aunt, a Holocaust survivor, who urged her nephew to move to Israel. He did and served in the Israeli Navy. A few years later he sought out his brother in Germany:

The reunion did not go well. Because of the language barrier, “there was a lot of smiling but not much to say,” Yufe recalled in The Times in 1979. He also remembered that his brother, worried about anti-Semitic family members, insisted he not mention his Jewish heritage and hid the luggage tags that showed Yufe had been in Israel.

Their similarities were not solely outward in clothing or appearance. They also included the “same hot temper…an explosively loud sneeze” and a love for butter and spicy cuisine; they also flushed the toilet before they used it. “I always thought I picked up my nervous habits from my father—like fidgeting with other people’s rubber bands and pads and paper clips—until I saw [Oskar],” Yufe once told The Los Angeles Times. “He’s the same way.”

They hated their similarities and didn’t talk for 25 years.

Eventually, the brother participated in a study about twins run by the University of Minnesota, where they go to know each other better. And yet, “their relationship,” writes Elaine Woo in the Times, “never lost it’s prickly edge.”

“They were repelled and fascinated by each other,” said Nancy Segal who was a researcher on the Minnesota study, which she also penned a book about. “They could not let go of the twinship.”

Read the entire Los Angeles Times article here, and watch a BBC documentary of the brothers below:

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