‘I knew nothing’: the Warsaw ghetto boy who found his family at 83

A DNA test has helped Shalom Koray find relatives in the US after escaping the Holocaust in a rucksack at the age of two

In 1943, a two-year-old boy found wandering the streets of the Warsaw ghetto at the height of the Jewish uprising was smuggled out in a rucksack, probably by a police officer.

The identity of the child could not be known. There was no one to attest even to a first name. His early life would be spent hidden away in orphanages, still not safe from antisemitic persecution, and without any real understanding of what it was to have a parent.