Best friends Betty and Ana Maria were inseparable. The 9-year-olds played together at recess, ate lunch together, giggled together – until one fateful day when the girls tearfully were separated, pulled apart from a tight embrace, desperate to hang on to one another.

It was 1939 and the girls’ families were fleeing Germany as the Nazi invasion marked the start of the horrific World War II. The pair stood in their Berlin schoolyard, not knowing that they would never see each other again. Until now.

Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg spent 82 years fearing the other was dead. During the Holocaust, some children went into hiding to escape Nazi persecution. Others toiled in internment camps where the living conditions were horrid; still others met a tragic end in the gas chambers of concentration camps.

Where did she go?

Both had been searching for each other all these years to learn what had happened. Changing their names in the past made it more difficult to track each other down.

An indexer from the nonprofit organization USC Shoah Foundation noticed similarities in the testimonies of two women. The organization produces and preserves audiovisual testimony of Holocaust survivors.

Miracle discovery

Once everything clicked, the pieces simply fell into place. A reunion was put together by the Shoah Foundation, the Florida Holocaust Museum and the Interactive Jewish Museum of Chile.

Finally, on Nov. 5 at the age of 91, Betty and Ana María found each other face to face and hugged each other again.

“It felt like coming home,” Betty said. “She was always on my mind.”

“It was very emotional,” echoed Ana María. “It was like we were never separated.”

The women, along with their families, finally laid eyes on one another in a hotel room. All the horrors of the past melted away.

Where were they?

Betty was one of 20,000 European Jews to settle in Shanghai. Ana María and her family ended up in Santiago, Chile. Both widows, the pair spent four days glued at the hip, sharing their lives and stories of the past.

They shopped, ate together and made up for lost time.

“We’re not the girls we used to be when we were 9, that’s for sure, but we kept giggling like we were little kids,” Betty said. “It was such a joy for both of us.”

Beautiful gifts from the heart

The women also exchanged sentimental gifts. Ana María brought Betty a Barbie doll wearing a Chilean costume, along with a framed photograph of herself and some jewelry.

Betty gave her longtime best friend a small heart-shaped sculpture.

“We both have the exact same thing now,” Betty noted, adding that she keeps the doll and photo on display in her bedroom. “It’s something for her to remember me and for me to remember her.”

Hope and joy

Today, even their adult children are friends. Staff at the Shoah Foundation were thrilled that the two best friend became reacquainted.

“These two remarkable women being reconnected after losing each other is such a testament of hope,” said Kori Street, senior director of programs and operations and deputy executive director of USC Shoah Foundation.

Watch the beauty of a long lost friendship blossom once again in the video below as these two women find each other after 82 years.

Please SHARE this with your friends and family.

Source: Washington Post, NBC News