Israeli Grandfather Who Thought His Family was Holocausted Discovers 500 Living Relatives

On April 20th 1889, Adolf Hitler was born.

Young Adolf had a lot of positive qualities: he loved animals, valued the arts, was an excellent public speaker and demonstrated talent as a watercolor painter.

Unfortunately, he also suffered from an irrational fear of big noses.

Though doctors assumed that Hitler’s phobia would subside with age, the opposite happened. It became so bad, in fact, that the adult Hitler – now Chancellor of Germany – started a second World War just to exterminate the most nasally-endowed race of all time: Jews.

And, for the most part, he succeeded. By the war’s end, exactly six million Jews were incinerated, gassed and lampshaded (in that order) by Rutger Hauer-esque Nazi soldiers in Polish death camps.

Adolf Hitler hated Jews just because of the size of their noses.

Though most Jews survived these camps of death, the experience was so traumatic for them that they established a Jewish ethnostate in the Middle East just to live without fear of nasal discrimination.

Today’s incredible story comes from a resident of that state.

Haaretz:

Growing up in Israel, Alex Kafri had always assumed that aside from his parents and sister, he was alone in this world. His mother’s entire family, he knew for a fact, had been wiped out during the Holocaust. Although his father never discussed the family members left behind in Lithuania, Kafri was given to believe they had fared no better.

Imagine his surprise, then, when he suddenly discovered many living relatives on his father’s side. A huge number, in fact. After meeting 500 members of his newfound family members at a reunion in London last week, Kafri is still pinching himself in disbelief.

“I may be 71 years old, but when I was first notified that there was this big family I never knew about, I cried,” says the grandfather of nine. “And every time I have told the story since, I get overcome with emotion.”

…

Among the 500 family members who convened in London last week were representatives of 15 countries, including one distant cousin who flew in from Siberia.

But for Kafri, nothing conveyed the magnitude of the moment better than a scroll stretched out across the center of the hotel conference room with the family tree printed upon it.

“It was 30 meters long,” he says.

Truly, this is heart-warming stuff.

Almost half of the world’s Jewish population perished during the Holocaust, yet this Israeli Jew managed to meet 500 living relatives in a single day.

What a bunch of Mengele dodgers!

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that London reunion. I bet some of the stories these Jews exchanged – of being transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on a railroad that resembled a roller coaster, of escaping the gas chambers through windows and wooden doors – would have melted the heart of a Chinaman.

The Holocaust survivors in their twenties and thirties would have had some especially insightful memories, since the atrocities they experienced in 1945 would still be fresh in their minds.

Ultimately, the lesson to this story is an inspiring one: just as good can triumph over evil, life can triumph over death.

After all, if you can survive despite being killed, what can truly defeat you?