80-Year-Old Meets Her 98-Year-Old Birth Mother For The Very First Time. This reunion story is a delight. Gerda Cole got the best and most unexpected 98th birthday present. She got to meet her daughter, Sonya Grist, for the firs time in 80 years.
The family reunion was a surprise to everyone and is thanks to the persistence of Stephen Grist, son to Sonya and grandson to Gerda. He explains that thanks to Brexit and the pandemic, he began to investigate who his mom’s birth parents were in order to apply for Austrian citizenship.
He says that his mother’s adoptive parents were secretive about it and although she had searched over the years she was unable to find them and eventually thought her mother had d=ied.
This reunion story is a delight. Gerda Cole got the best and most unexpected 98th birthday present. She got to meet her daughter, Sonya Grist, for the first time in 80 years.
The family reunion was a surprise to everyone and is thanks to the persistence of Stephen Grist, son to Sonya and grandson to Gerda. He explains that thanks to Brexit and the pandemic, he began to investigate who his mom’s birth parents were in order to apply for Austrian citizenship.
He claims that his mother’s adoptive parents kept it a secret from her, and that she looked for them for years but was unable to locate them, leading her to believe that her mother had died.
Gerda was discovered to be alive and well at a nursing facility in Canada! During World War II, Gerda was a young Jewish girl fleeing persecution in Austria. She gave her newborn daughter up for adoption as an 18-year-old immigrant in England who lacked the financial wherewithal to rear a kid.
“I had very minimal personal education, and this, combined with wartime, left me with no choice except to have Sonya adopted on the refuge committee’s advice,” she told CBC News. “The condition was that no future contact with the child be made.”
When Sonya found that her mother was alive and ready to celebrate her 98th birthday, she booked a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada to meet her for the first time.
“I had no idea my mum was still alive until just over a year ago.” I didn’t know much. I still don’t know much, and I have a million questions for her, but I don’t want to bother her,” Sonya explained.
However, the two have discovered that they share many interests, including a love of travel and steel band music. According to the Toronto Sun, Gerda is overjoyed to see her daughter. “Thank you for this opportunity, my daughter, my grandson Stephen,” Gerda added, “it means so lot to be able to survive to see this moment.”