A 98-year-old woman from Ontario says she received the best Mother’s Day gift she could imagine after seeing her daughter again for the first time in eighty years.
As a young Jewish girl, Gerda Cole escaped persecution in her native Vienna, Austria in 1939 at the height of World War II. Her parents sent her by children’s transport to England.
At the age of 18, she gave birth to her newborn daughter, Sonia Grist, in 1942, but due to her economic situation, she was advised by the Refugee Committee in England to give her daughter up for adoption and was told to have no more contact with the child.
The mother and daughter have been separated for 80 years.
On Saturday, the two held on tightly to each other during the gathering. Cole screamed in excitement and repeated the words “80 years” in bewilderment. Her daughter joked, “Don’t stress my age.”
“Thank you all for coming and sharing this wonderful experience with me. “I’m so happy I can say ‘my daughter,'” Cole said Saturday. “It means so much to be able to live to see these moments.”
Stephen Grist helped his mother track down Cole in Canada and contacted her at a long-term care home in Toronto. He said he had always hoped to find the name and origin of his birth grandmother.
“I was totally expecting to find any evidence of death in the end,” he said Saturday. “I finally found Gerda’s stepson and was told that Gerda was alive and well and living in a home in Canada. It was such a shock to the system. That changed everything. “
“When I told my mother, the first thing she said was, ‘I want to go on a plane to Canada and hug my mother,’ but we couldn’t do it because of the pandemic, but here we are.”
Sonia Grist said she knew Cole was her mother in their first email correspondence they ever had when Cole wrote to her: “You have to understand that I don’t like this computer.
“That was exactly what I would say,” she said with a laugh.
The mother and daughter spent the rest of the day talking and dancing with each other during the gathering. It was a moment they would both always appreciate.
“Don’t wait until tomorrow before it’s too late, if you want to live, live now, not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” Cole said Saturday. “That’s all the advice I have to give.”
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