102 year-old reunited with family he thought had died in Holocaust

(19 Nov 2017) LEADIN:
A 102-year-old Holocaust survivor has been reunited with a newly discovered nephew in an emotional first meeting.
Eliahu Pietruszka fled Poland during World War II and thought his entire family had perished.
But only days ago, he learned that a younger brother had also survived and that his son was coming to see him.
STORYLINE
With the help of a walking frame, 102 year-old Eliahu Pietruszka moves through the lobby of his Israeli retirement home to embrace a man he has never met.
Eliahu and his nephew Alexandre hug each other tightly and both begin crying.
In a frail, squeaky voice Eliahu begins blurting out greetings in Russian, a language he hadn't spoken in decades.
Only days earlier, the Holocaust survivor who fled Poland at the beginning of World War II and thought his entire family had perished learned that a younger brother had also survived, and his son, 66-year-old Alexandre, was flying in from a remote part of Russia to see him.
The emotional meeting was made possible by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial's comprehensive online database of Holocaust victims, a powerful genealogy tool that has reunited hundreds of long-lost relatives.
But given the dwindling number of survivors and their advanced ages, the event seemed likely to be among the last of its kind.
A 24-year-old Pietruszka fled Warsaw in 1939 as World War II erupted, heading to the Soviet Union and leaving behind his parents and twin brothers Volf and Zelig, who were nine years younger than him.
His parents and Zelig were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto and killed in a Nazi death camp, but Volf also managed to escape.
The brothers briefly corresponded before Volf was sent to a Siberian work camp, where Pietruszka assumed he had died.
Then two weeks ago, his grandson, Shakhar Smorodinsky, received an email from a cousin in Canada who was working on her family tree and had uncovered a Yad Vashem page of testimony filled out in 2005 by Volf Pietruszka for his older brother Eliahu whom he thought had died.
Volf, it appeared, had survived and settled in Magnitogorsk, an industrial city in the Ural Mountains.
Smorodinsky tracked down an address and reached out to discover that Volf had died in 2011 but that Alexandre, his only child, still lived there.
After Smorodinsky arranged a brief Skype chat, Alexandre decided to come see the uncle he never knew he had.
"The fact that Shakhar my grandson discovered this wonderful thing, it really made me very happy that there's at least one other remnant from my brother, and that is his son," says Eliahu.
Smorodinsky, a 47-year-old professor from Ben-Gurion University in southern Israel, invited the Associated Press and one local Israeli outlet to record Thursday evening's intimate reunion at his grandfather's retirement home in central Israel.
The rate of reunions has trickled significantly in recent years as elderly survivors have passed away, making each one of them increasingly significant
Debbie Berman, a Yad Vashem official at the reunion, said it was incredibly moving to be there
"Really it is an unbelievable thing to witness something like this, I feel as an employee of Yad Vashem that this is one of the last opportunities that we will have to witness something like this, I feel that we are kind of touching a piece of history. This reunion between Eliahu and his nephew who came immediately to meet him from Russia when the revelation was made happened thanks to the information that they found, that Eliahu's grandson found on Yad Vashem's central database of Shoah victims' names," she says.

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