RISHON LEZION, Israel, Feb. 4 - Klara Bleier and Hana Katz thought each 
other dead, swallowed 61 years ago, like the rest of their family, in the 
maw of Auschwitz.

The sisters were separated in October 1944 in the Budapest ghetto when 
Hana left one day to find work and food. She never returned.

But both came through the chaos of the end of the war against the Nazis, 
the death marches and the refugee camps; both came to Israel in 1948 and 
raised families, 45 miles apart. Both thought they were sole survivors.

In the years since, Ms. Bleier's son-in-law became obsessed with the 
missing family history. Ms. Katz's granddaughter did, too. Six years 
apart, they filed survivor testimonies with Yad Vashem, Israel's center 
for Holocaust studies and commemoration.

A new computerized archive matched the two testimonies, and on Thursday - 
a week after heads of state bowed their heads at Auschwitz on the 60th 
anniversary of its liberation - the two women were restored to each other, 
astounded, slightly frightened and unrecognizable, at least at first.

Ms. Bleier, 83, her hair wavy and red, said she still thought she was 
dreaming. When she first spoke to Ms. Katz, 79, "I suddenly felt faint and 
couldn't catch my breath," she said in her living room here. "I couldn't 
get up and stand." 

"But then I began to get used to the idea," she said, grabbing her 
sister's hand. "After 61 years, that such a thing could happen," she said. 
"I never would believe it."

Ms. Katz, who has a shock of straight white hair, is a practical woman who 
made her life in Israel on a moshav, or semi-cooperative farm, near Haifa. 
"The way you call Mom, Mom, I call God, God," she said. "But this just 
shows you that God doesn't close all the doors."

Ms. Bleier said, "If we're still alive and look the way we do, it's a 
miracle."

The sisters grew up in Ardanovo, a small town in the Carpathians in what 
was then Czechoslovakia but now part of Ukraine. Their father, Menashe 
Waiss, had two brothers in Budapest, and in 1941, he decided Klara and 
Hana would be safer there. It was the last time they saw him or their 
mother, Shaindel, or their three younger siblings.

"The last letter we got from our parents was in April 1944," Ms. Bleier 
said. "They wrote together, and my mother wrote: 'I'm afraid it's our last 
letter,' and it was."

They know their mother died, aged 40, at Auschwitz; they know nothing of 
the fate of their father or siblings.

Hana was captured and made to dig trenches and fill sandbags, and then put 
on a death march to the concentration camp of Mauthausen. "They beat us," 
Ms. Katz said, agitated. "If someone fell or couldn't walk, they shot 
them. The Hungarians threw all sorts of things down on us from the 
windows."

But at Mauthausen, "there was nothing for us," she said. "We were hiding 
in haystacks, full of lice. It was terrible. I must have been sick, but I 
remember someone shouting, 'The war is over - go home.' It was the 
British."

She went back to Ardanovo, but it was empty. She met her husband-to-be in 
a displaced persons' camp and married in 1945, coming to Israel in 1948 on 
a boat the British at first did not allow to land. "We were hiding arms on 
the boat, Czech arms, for the Israeli soldiers in the war of independence, 
so all the women stood on the top of the boat as camouflage," Ms. Katz 
said.

In the ghetto, Ms. Bleier had a child, who had to be fed. The Germans had 
taken her husband, Aryeh, to a work camp and she was told he had died. 

"I took my son and covered the yellow star with him so no one would see 
it," she said. "I stood in line with all the goyim and covered my head as 
they did, and got whatever food they got." 

At last the Soviet Army liberated Budapest, she said, "and we all went to 
wherever we could find a place." 

She found a surviving uncle. And her husband, after all, was alive. "At 
the end of the war he came back," she said. "He weighed 40 kilos" - 88 
pounds.

Her son survived and became a general in the Israeli Army; she had a 
daughter, Hana, in a British displaced persons' camp in Cyprus. Hana 
developed polio, and they were allowed to go to Israel in 1948, where 
Aryeh was immediately drafted to fight the invading Arab armies. Hana was 
put in a clinic in Jerusalem, while Aryeh spent two years besieged on 
Mount Scopus, unable to leave.

"After the war," Ms. Bleier said, "he came down from Mount Scopus right to 
the clinic and told Hana, 'That's it, you're coming home.' "

Asked what she thought about the state of Israel, Ms. Bleier stopped. "I 
came here because that's where they brought us," she said. "I had it very 
hard here."

Morris Blum, Hana's husband, filed the testimony at Yad Vashem in 1993. "I 
felt I did something very big, that I could donate something to the 
family," he said.

Ms. Katz's granddaughter, Merav Melamed Zamir, filed her mother's 
testimony in 1999. "My husband made me do it," she said. "He loves my 
grandma and he knew the story of the Shoah." 

Ms. Zamir, now 31, went to Auschwitz on a school trip at 15. "I knew my 
great grandmother died there," she said. When she visited Auschwitz, "my 
life changed," she said. "And I went again to death camps after giving 
birth, and my view of life changed again. And now again, my life has 
changed," she said. "I want to tell people never to give up, to keep 
searching. I feel like I've earned something."

The two sisters sat together on the couch, holding hands and smiling at 
one another. "Look," said Mr. Blum quietly, pointing. "When they smile, 
they look just the same."