Best friends separated in the Holocaust are reunited after 82 years

Best friends who were separated while fleeing the Holocaust in Nazi Germany have been reunited after 82 years apart.

Betty Grebenschikoff and Ana María Wahrenberg, both 91, grew up together in 1930s Berlin, according to a release from the USC Shoah Foundation.

However, after the war ended, they both assumed that the other had died.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Grebenschikoff said: "For 82 years, I thought my best friend in Germany was dead. I'd been looking for her for all those years, and I never found her."

Check out a report about the two women's incredible story below: 

However, against the odds, both women and their nuclear families survived the atrocity, but because they changed their names afterward, it made finding each other impossible.

The pair were reunited in November of last year over Zoom when their stories were connected by Ita Gordon, a cataloguer and indexer for the USC Shoah Foundation.

"It was such a miracle," Grebenschikoff told the Post. "It was like no time had passed. Of course, 82 years makes a difference, but more or less, we just picked up where we left off."

According to the release, Wahrenberg and her family fled Germany for South America in 1939, and her story was featured in a webinar attended by Gordon back in November.

He took notes about her recollections and later asked if she'd recorded her testimony for the Visual History Archive.

She hadn't.

However, when Gordon searched a number of variations of her name, a search for Annemarie Wahrenberg led her to a 1997 testimony given by Grebenschikoff, whose story matched a number of details in Wahrenberg's.

Gordon then heard Grebenschikoff reflect on her long-lost best friend, revealing that while the pair had planned to write to each other after fleeing, they never did - with Grebenschikoff moving to China.

In the testimony, Grebenschikoff said: "She probably died in the war, but I'm not sure."

Gordon went on to discover that like Wahrenberg, Grebenschikoff had changed her name, and she was now living in Florida.

She then reached out to museums that had worked with both women before getting in touch with their families to confirm their friendship and then finally setting up a Zoom reunion.

"I didn't cry or anything, [but] what I did was stay very quiet and say to myself, 'You may have to act, but right now, feel it.' Because there might be a chance that two dear friends might be together [again]," Gordon said in the release.

When the old friends were finally reunited, they spoke for almost two hours on Zoom and had some champagne to toast to life as they introduced each other to their families.

"This is a total gift in her life," Grebenschikoff's daughter Jennifer told the Post. "All of us were just stunned to watch the two women connect so quickly and start laughing like they were still 9 years old."