Separated at Birth: The Nazi Twin Meets the Jewish Twin
How’s this for an awkward family reunion: Identical twins separated in infancy reunite to find that one was Hitler Youth from Germany and the other a Jew from a kibbutz in Israel. It didn’t go well.
You’ve heard about the long-lost twins who show up for the reunion in the same outfit. Oskar Stohr said watching his brother, Jack Yufe, approach at the Frankfurt airport was like watching a film of himself. They had the same blue shirt, the same build, the same gait, and the same cadences, though they did not share a mother tongue.
This was 10 years after WWII. The reunion was immediately awkward because of the language barrier. They both knew some Yiddish, but Oskar made it clear he didn’t want anyone to know he was Jewish and they shouldn’t speak Yiddish in public. Jack was offended and regretted reaching out to his twin.
They were 21, and hadn’t been together since they were a few months old. It was strange in itself that their parents split the twins when they split up in the 1930s. Their Catholic mother took Oskar to Germany, leaving Jack with their Jewish father in Trinidad. Oskar was taught to hide his Jewishness, crucial in Nazi Germany, but also because he had an antisemitic stepfather. As a teen, Oskar joined the Hitler Youth, which was mandatory. And Jack was sent to labor on an Israeli kibbutz at age 15. They both knew they had a twin somewhere.
But these two could barely sit down together. They stayed together at Oskar’s small house, barely speaking. Their wives, however, were busy noting the similarities: They were both meticulous, heavy drinkers, and hot-tempered.
Jack left after one uncomfortable week, and they didn’t speak again for 25 years. Then in 1979, Jack read about the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared-Apart that aimed to determine which traits are inherited and which are learned from environment. Jack took a chance and reached out again. To his surprise, Oskar wanted to come to Minneapolis.
They were a sight at the airport. It’s as if they had become more alike. They wore the same rimmed glasses, the same neatly trimmed mustaches, the same quirky shirts with epaulets and four pockets on the front, the same collection of rubber bands on their wrists. Now in their 50s, they were in the mood to laugh about the similarities that kept coming all week: Both always flushed the toilet before using it, read magazines back to front, dipped buttered toast in coffee, liked to bring a book to restaurants, loved spicy food. And they both still had tantrums, and now anxiety attacks.
To be sure, there were differences. Oskar suffered from narcolepsy, and Jack didn’t. And there was a moment that week when Oskar told Jack that as a boy he admired Hitler. This time, Jack wanted to understand how that is possible. “It shows what a smooth propaganda machine can do to children’s minds,” he said.
What would happen if you sat down with a stranger and looked for parallels? You’d find them, at about the same rate as fraternal twins, who share 50% of their DNA. But identical twins, who share 100% of their DNA, don’t just like the same beer, for example. It’s the aggregate of their matching behaviors that’s striking. At times it seems as if they have invisible umbilical cords. At one point, Oskar did a playful fake sneeze in a waiting room to diffuse the somber mood, and Jack got a chill because he had always liked to do funny sneezes among stone-faced people in elevators.
Maybe we are interested in the twin enigma because we envy the condition of not being alone. Twins are the exception to the human condition. You can’t separate them. They have that magical connection that the rest of us are driven to go find (often with the wrong person). That bond is so powerful it can overcome the hatred of Nazis and the poison of unforgiveness. That’s what love can do.
