In May 1944, a 14-year-old boy named David was deported from his hometown in Hungary to Auschwitz along with his family. When the train arrived at the ramp, the SS guards separated the passengers into two lines. Those on the left were sent to the gas chambers. Those on the right were sent to the labor camps.
David was sent to the right. His identical twin brother, Yitzhak, was sent to the left. But what David did not know, and what Yitzhak only learned decades later, was that Yitzhak had not been sent to the gas chambers. He had been selected by Dr. Josef Mengele for medical experiments, a fate that was arguably worse than death.
Yitzhak and David were not told about each other. They were sent to different camps. Yitzhak survived the experiments and was liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945. David was liberated by American forces at Dachau in April 1945. Neither of them knew the other had survived.
They lived their lives. David emigrated to the United States, married, and had three children. Yitzhak emigrated to Israel, married, and had two children. They lived 6,000 miles apart, never knowing the other was alive.
In 2006, David applied for a genealogy DNA test for a family health project. His DNA was matched to a man in Israel named Yitzhak. The laboratory called David and told him he had a genetic match that was consistent with being an identical twin. David did not believe them. He had no idea he was a twin.
A researcher contacted Yitzhak in Israel. Yitzhak had always believed he had been a twin, but he had never learned the name of his brother or whether he had survived. When he was told that a man in America shared his DNA, he flew to New York, and the two brothers met for the first time in 62 years.
They sat in a hotel room in Manhattan. They had never seen each other in the mirror. They were identical in every way. They spoke in Hungarian, the language they had last shared as children, and they told each other the stories of their lives. Yitzhak said, I thought about you every day. I just did not know your name.