I Thought Dad’s Entire Family Died in the Holocaust. A MyHeritage DNA Test Proved Otherwise
I grew up with a quiet, persistent sense of emptiness. Even as a child, I felt as though something essential was missing, though I didn’t yet have the words for it. My father carried a silence that filled our home, and I absorbed it without ever fully understanding its source. He never told me anything about his life before arriving in New Zealand. I believed, as he did, that his entire family had been murdered in the Holocaust. That knowledge shaped my sense of who I was… and how alone I was in the world.
Adriana Turk
When my brother Julian died, that loneliness became overwhelming. He was found on a street in Auckland on Christmas Eve 2024, homeless and struggling with substance abuse. With his death, I became the last of my immediate family. I was 74 years old, and the final thread connecting me to my childhood had been cut. Around me, here in Sydney, fear for Jewish lives was once again part of daily reality. History no longer felt distant. It felt frighteningly close.
Grief pushed me to do something I had never seriously considered before. I decided to take a DNA test.
I didn’t expect miracles. I imagined I might learn a few historical details and perhaps confirm what I already believed. I chose MyHeritage because everything I read suggested it was the best place to look for European ancestry. I swabbed my cheek without really knowing what I was hoping to find.
The family my father fled, and the truth I inherited
My father, Hans — later known as John — Turk fled Nazi Germany in 1937. He was in his mid-30s when he boarded a ship from Amsterdam to New Zealand, convinced it was the furthest place from Germany possible. His German-Jewish wife, Betty Mendel, was able to join him.
Adriana’s father, Hans Turk, later known as John
His mother, Emmy — Ernestine — was not. She was deemed too old and unable to speak English. My grandfather Julian had already died years earlier, in 1926.
Julian Turk, Adriana’s grandfather
When the war began, contact with the family left behind was cut off. After years of uncertainty, my father learned the truth he had dreaded. His mother Emmy was murdered in 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto.
His baby sister Herta, her husband, and their two children — just 9 and 13 years old — were murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. The fate of the rest of the family appeared no different.
In 1949, my father lost his wife Betty to cancer. They had no children together. He was utterly alone, emotionally broken and carrying losses he rarely spoke about. In 1950 he married my mother, Winifred Cartner, a non-Jewish woman more than 14 years his junior. My brother and I were born shortly after, about a year apart.
Adriana with her mother and brother Jules about 25 years ago
We grew up inside our father’s unspoken trauma. The story he lived with, and passed on to us, was that everyone had perished. That was the truth until his death in 1990. And it remained my truth for decades after.
When DNA contradicted everything I believed
When my MyHeritage DNA results arrived last September, I was unprepared for what I saw. There were not just one or two distant connections, but dozens. Fourth cousins, fifth cousins, relatives scattered across countries I had never associated with my family. For the first time, the idea that I might not be alone began to take shape.
Over the following months, I slowly gathered the courage to reach out to some of those matches online. I didn’t know what I was looking for — only that I wanted to understand who these people were, and how we might be connected.
One particular match, a third cousin in Germany, became a turning point. Through him and his mother, my second cousin, I learned something that overturned a lifetime of belief. One of my grandmother Emmy’s brothers had living descendants.
His name was Max Gusdorf.
Max Gusdorf, Adriana’s great-uncle
Max was murdered in Sobibor in 1943. But 3 of his children survived. One stayed in Germany, one escaped to Brazil, and the third — Hans Reuven Rudolph — to the Holy Land.
Reuven lived a life rooted in purpose. He became a kibbutz member, working in agriculture and dedicating himself to breeding region-specific avocado and kiwi strains. In 1942, just 3 years after arriving in the Holy Land, he was recruited into the Palmach’s German Platoon, a covert unit trained entirely in German for operations behind enemy lines. Later, he served in the Jewish Brigade, assisted Holocaust survivors, helped track Nazi war criminals in the Netherlands, and fought in Israel’s War of Independence.
Reuven Gidron
From a family I believed had vanished, there are now children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren living across the world — in Germany, Israel, Brazil, and far beyond.
Becoming whole
By then, I was reaching out to DNA matches whenever I could, trying to turn names on a screen into something real. I wanted to understand where my family had gone and whether any part of it had survived.
Naama Lanski from the MyHeritage research team helped connect me with more descendants. One of the people Naama managed to locate was my second cousin in Israel, Raanan Gidron — the son of Reuven, Max Gusdorf’s son who escaped Germany before the war.
Raanan (right) with his brothers Uri and Michael and parents Reuven and Lisa
To make the connection, Raanan came to the MyHeritage office and met Naama in person. From there, the two of them called me together.
Raanan meets researcher Naama Lanski at the MyHeritage headquarters
Seeing Raanan for the first time on the screen, with Naama beside him, was overwhelming. The picture was suddenly very clear to me: how we were connected, how much life had continued. It was like magic.
The meeting was profound. It felt like he’d always been there, but I hadn’t lifted that leaf up.
I feel like a new person.
2025 was the most difficult year of my 74. And yet, in the midst of loss, something extraordinary happened. I now have a beautiful new family — more than 50 relatives — who have made me feel whole.
After a lifetime of believing that only death remained where my father’s family once stood, I have found life: resilient, expansive, and defiant. At a time when fear is again rising, that feels not just healing, but necessary.
Many thanks to Adriana Turk and Raanan Gidron for sharing their amazing story with us. If you’ve also made an incredible discovery with MyHeritage, we’d love to hear about it! Please share it with us via this form or email us at stories@myheritage.com.
