For 82 years, Betty Grebenschikoff believed her best friend from Germany was dead. But just a few weeks ago, there she was in the flesh, standing in a St. Petersburg, Fla., hotel room. The last time Grebenschikoff saw Ana María Wahrenberg was in the spring of 1939, when they were 9 years old. They shared a tearful hug in a Berlin schoolyard before their families were forced to flee the country and the Nazis on the cusp of World War II.
They both thought that would be their final hug. But on Nov. 5, after more than eight decades apart, the two women — now 91 years old — embraced once again. "It felt like coming home," Grebenschikoff said.
"It was very emotional," echoed Wahrenberg. "It was like we were never separated." The story of their fated friendship, and the series of fluke events that recently brought them back together, was chronicled in the international news media, including in the Washington Post, earlier this year.
The Holocaust survivors had searched for each other for years, scouring databases and seeking information from anyone who might know something. They had no luck, mainly because both women changed their names later in life. "She was always on my mind," Grebenschikoff said.
It wasn't until an indexer from USC Shoah Foundation — a nonprofit organization founded by Steven Spielberg, which produces and preserves audiovisual testimony of Holocaust survivors — noticed similarities in their testimonies and ultimately linked the women together. For the first time, Grebenschikoff — who was one of 20,000 European Jews to settle in Shanghai — found out what happened to her long-lost childhood best friend: In November 1939, Wahrenberg and her family fled to Santiago, Chile, where she still lives today.
In a reunion facilitated by the Shoah Foundation, as well as the Florida Holocaust Museum and the Interactive Jewish Museum of Chile, the two women and their families reconnected last November on a Zoom call. Talking in their native German, they vowed to meet in person, and one year later, they finally did. As they hugged for the first time in 82 years, Grebenschikoff said, "we just had this feeling, like we really belonged together."
The original plan was to meet in Florida, where Grebenschikoff lives, for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, in September, but the pandemic postponed their in-person reunion. By November, though, Wahrenberg felt more comfortable traveling and booked the trip with her son and his wife. Grebenschikoff went to meet Wahrenberg at her hotel room, and "it was as if we had seen each other yesterday," she said. "It was so comfortable."
The feeling was mutual for Wahrenberg: "It was very special that two people, after 82 years, still love one another." The women, both of whom are widowed, spent four days glued at the hip. They went shopping, shared meals and, mostly, talked for hours — making up for lost time.
