In 1942, while Nazis were forcing the Jews of Krosno, Poland to move into the local ghetto, they missed at least one: an eight-month-old Jewish infant, left in a ditch by her frantic mother, wrapped only in a blanket, with just a birthdate and false first name pinned to the wool. A passing Polish couple found the child, brought her home and raised her as a Christian. She never knew her real name or identity, despite—she told people years later—always feeling that she was Jewish.
It wasn’t until 2017 that a band of keen Jewish genealogy researchers, including the late Stanley Diamond of Montreal, managed to crack the mystery and confirm that Maria Vasitinskaya was really Rivka Silber. And despite her parents and two older siblings being murdered in the Holocaust, Diamond was able to reconnect the child survivor, then 78, with her extended family, including approximately 100 relatives in Israel and around the world.
In April 2025, this remarkable true story is being published as a new non-fiction book, One in Six Million, by Amy Fish, a Canadian author. Fish joins The CJN Daily to explain how the tale fell into her lap—and how an unexpected genetic twist made telling it literally part of her own DNA.
Transcript
Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors.
Stanley Diamond: Lily, let me just touch on a couple of things that you said. First of all, the story of two brothers with different names that is certainly not unusual. We’ve heard different.
Ellin Bessner: That’s the voice of the late Stanley Diamond. During the pandemic, he was leading a Zoom meeting with members of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal, where he helped people trace their family roots, as was his passion. This was par for the course for Diamond, the founder, with his wife, of an important database of over 6.5 million vital records of Jews in Poland. People around the world use this database today to find what happened to their families before, during, and after the Holocaust.
For nearly 30 years, until he died in December at the age of 91, Stanley Diamond helped ordinary people find their roots. But his database also allowed celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and the former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, to learn about their ancestors. However, one of his cases stands out above the rest, and it’s now being told in a new book appropriately called “One in Six Million.” It’s by Montreal author Amy Fish, detailing the journey of a woman named Maria Vasitinskaya, whose online searching came to Diamond’s attention in 2016.
In 1942, the Nazis were rounding up her parents and two older children in the Polish town of Krosno. Maria was eight months old, and in a last-ditch effort to save her baby, her mother left her in a ditch, wrapped in a blanket with her real birth date and a fake first name, Maria, pinned to the cloth. This baby was quickly found by a childless Polish couple (Antonina and Vasili Markovitch) who took a great risk to save her and then raised her as their own during the war, even though they were sure she was Jewish. Eventually, the girl’s adoptive father sent her to live in Siberia, where Maria had a hard life.
Maria always suspected she was Jewish but didn’t know where to find out. Nearly 20 years ago, when Maria paid a visit to Yad Vashem in Israel, she decided to start looking for her true identity.
In 2016, Stanley Diamond saw an online posting on a genealogical website and with an international team of amateur sleuths like himself, successfully helped track down Maria’s true name, Rivka Silber. By 2017, with the advent of DNA testing, he also helped her meet her real family of a hundred cousins scattered around the world, including in Israel, who didn’t even know Maria existed.
I’m Ellin Besner and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Thursday, March 27, 2025. Welcome to the CJN Daily, a podcast of the Canadian Jewish News and made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Although the late Stanley Diamond had been well known in Montreal and internationally for his decades of genealogical work, it wasn’t until he met the author Amy Fish, that he agreed to have her write the full story of how he was able to give back Maria’s stolen identity. While Fish herself comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, she hadn’t specialized in this genre, but she knew it needed to be a book. Not only did Diamond ultimately discover his own family’s DNA ties to Maria, but the author Amy Fish’s, too. Amy Fish joins me now to talk about how, even decades later, it’s so important to help the remaining Holocaust survivors reunite with long-lost family.
Amy Fish: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Ellin Bessner: Congratulations on your new book. Maybe we could start off by telling our listeners how you got into doing this story.
Amy Fish: The idea was as much a shock to me, Ellin, honestly, as to anyone. I usually write funny books. My books are normally about how to complain effectively, how to stand up for yourself. One day in January 2019, so six years ago, I was at a Shiva, and I started talking to this man, Stanley Diamond, who I knew nothing about, and it turned out was actually kind of famous. He was a genealogist. He just passed away, as you know, and he was a genealogist who helped people retrace their family trees. I said to him, okay, fine, give me an example. He told me this incredible story of a baby who had been left by the side of the road in Poland in 1942. All she had was a little note tucked in with her that had her name and her birth date. Going only on that, he was able to retrace her entire family tree. I thought about it all night, and the next day I contacted him and I said, “Has anybody ever written a story?” And that was six years ago.
Ellin Bessner: Let’s tell our audience a bit about your own experience with genealogy and family history. I’m one of those people that does research on this. I do family trees, I do Ancestry, whatever I can, for my own. Then there’s everyone else who rolls their eyes and goes, “Oh, SHE’s got the box. SHE has all the pictures, everything.” So what team are you on?
Amy Fish: I am on “Team genealogy is boring!”. My eyes are glazing over. I have never looked at a family tree and found it interesting. My sister has all the pictures. That’s why I’m saying it was a shock to me to start going down this, it has to be called a rabbit hole, and start uncovering how genealogists actually do their work.
I’m a big reader of People magazine, and you know, sometimes you’ll see “Reunited after 52 years”, and it won’t explain how. For me, this book, “One in Six Million,” gives you the how. Readers will understand exactly how step by step by step you go from “I think I have a long lost mother or brother or cousin” to now we’re in contact.
Ellin Bessner: with more and more of these stories, like you said in People magazine. There are TV shows all over the world where celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow to the former Second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff, went back and retraced their Jewish roots. It’s become more of a thing. And then, of course, all the DNA testing, which wasn’t available when Stanley Diamond started this work 25-20 years ago. You just, you know, spit into a little test tube and then you upload it, if you want, and your life could change for the better or for the worse. You may find things you didn’t want to know. It happened in my family too.
Amy Fish: Oh, that sounds good. That sounds juicy.
Ellin Bessner: Yeah, there was a cousin nobody knew about. So all these things. Let’s go back to how this research is done because we’re talking about floppy disks and Lotus, IBM spreadsheets, like no one even knows what that is anymore. They didn’t have what we have when they started. Give us a picture of how Stanley got, I guess you call it analog, started old school.
Amy Fish: Stanley was doing research because someone in his family had a genetic trait that could be harmful. When he heard about that, it’s called beta thalassemia. If two people with beta thalassemia go on to have children together, it could be a problem; they could end up with a genetic disease. He wanted to warn people and tell them that they were carriers. That was his initial vision. So he thought, “I need to contact as many family members as I can and let them know about this genetic trait.” To do that, he went to Poland to research more about his family tree. When he was there, he went into room after room of paper, and he realized, like, I can’t be the only person looking at these papers. There has to be a way to make it searchable. Which sounded crazy back then. Now of course everything’s searchable. But he was the pioneer who said, we’re going to make this searchable. And he recruited volunteers, hired people to go into the stacks, take the papers, type them into spreadsheets in Poland, save them on floppy disks in Poland, and send them to Scotland, send them to Canada, send them to the U.S. wherever they would be uploaded into a master database. Then people would send their queries, and they would get a response. That was the early, early JRI- Poland.
Ellin Bessner: Why was it important to Stanley to help people find their long-lost relatives or those relatives who didn’t come back from the Holocaust?
Amy Fish: I don’t want to speak for Stanley. I spent a lot of time with him. I interviewed him, as you know, for at least two years, almost weekly. I did over 100 interviews with Stanley Diamond. But even with that, I’m reluctant to speak for him. I can tell you that I think one of the reasons it was so important to him is because he really wanted to bring light into the world. I think he thought there is so much darkness, and here’s an opportunity to be helpful. He loved the schmooze. This guy loved the schmooze. I also think Stanley liked a puzzle. He really enjoyed the figuring out and the brainpower. I mean, this is a guy who went to Harvard and did his MBA, years ago when no one from Montreal was going to Harvard.
Ellin Bessner: He did this for the Holocaust. But there were also mysteries that he solved for non-Jewish people. In your book you talk about it. Was it about a Catholic nun that was looking for Jewish roots?
Amy Fish: Yes. There were examples of him being on the radio, being on call-in shows, and people would call up and say, “I inherited this and this from my father.” He would tell them exactly where to look. “Check the ship’s manifest, check the tenant records.” He had such a vast knowledge of archives and data.
Ellin Bessner: And one of the stories, of course, which is the central theme that stretches throughout your book is the Maria story. How many hours did Stanley work on solving who she was, how she got to be adopted by a Polish couple, and how come it took until she was in her 80s till she found out she was Jewish and who her parents were?
Amy Fish: The whole project took about two years.
Ellin Bessner: You got to meet this Maria. Why did she want to know so badly where she came from?
Amy Fish: She grew up always feeling like a piece of her was missing. That’s how she explained it to me. She felt like a puzzle with a missing piece. It was interesting, through her life she had always gravitated toward Jewish friends when she lived in Poland, when she lived in Ukraine, when she lived in Siberia. She was very close with the Jews. Always she felt pulled and she just wanted to know, is this true? At a certain point, one of her best friends brought her to Israel before she knew who she was. She went to Yad Vashem, and she walked through the Hall of Names, and she just thought, “I am connected here, and I don’t know how, and I can’t even look up who my parents were to pay my respects because I don’t know who they were.” It just really hit her at that moment.
Ellin Bessner: In your book, though, you also say because of her dark looks or Jewishy looks, she was bullied when she was growing up.
Amy Fish: Yes, absolutely true. She always suspected she was Jewish. She knew that she did not have a lot of money, which was common for Jews at the time. Almost like a refugee or a peasant kind of garb. She was small and dark. The Polish kids used to laugh at her and make fun of her all the time.
Ellin Bessner: Now her story is a very sad one, in a way. She had a hard life. When you learned through your research that she could have been given back to her family, survivors of the Holocaust–not her own family, they were killed–and those adoptive parents that took her off the road didn’t give her back when they could have. Then all these years went by where she missed out on being part of this extended Jewish family. How did that impact her life, and how did you feel about it when you learned this?
Amy Fish: When I imagined the post-war climate, post-Holocaust climate in Eastern Europe, I just imagine it as very chaotic. The parents who took her off the road really loved her, and they could not have children of their own. They saw this baby, and they thought, this is our chance. To them, it was their daughter. I imagine a family member coming all the way back to the town and asking for any hints. “Does anyone know where the daughter is?” I can just imagine the parents making an emotional run for it. Just a last minute, “what are we gonna do? Let’s go.” You know? And it’s so hard for me to put myself in any character’s shoes. I could be Maria, clinging to the only parents I knew. I could be her birth family who is clinging to any vestige, any relative, any child left behind that they want to raise. I could put myself in the hands of these people who heard something mewling in the road, who took in a baby when they had no business doing it. I imagine Gestapo on the right and on the left, and them sticking this little baby under their coat and pretending that Antonina was pregnant and this was her child. So I can’t really have any kind of judgment or emotion. I just picture complete chaos, if that makes sense to you.
Ellin Bessner: It does. And I understand that decision and then the other decisions that happened over all these years changed people’s lives, even though she was like Cinderella for a little bit, for them, and it was not an easy childhood. But in the end, the real Maria, after she found out who her real family was, still wanted to have her adoptive family, her rescuers, honoured by Yad Vashem. How did the reunion of Maria and her Israeli and her Jewish and her other cousins happen?
Amy Fish: She was told she was Jewish by the Chabad rabbi in Omsk, which was a deal that had been made during the search. He brought her in, and then he found one of her key relatives and Skyped with her and brought Maria in. She was for the first time able to look a blood relative in the eyes over Skype. That group of cousins said, “We need to bring her here.” They organized a family reunion with cousins on her mother’s side and her father’s side, first cousins on both sides, and brought her to Israel to meet with all of them. She says it was just a very emotional, overwhelming experience for her.
Ellin Bessner: How many relatives did she learn?
Amy Fish: She had over 100.
Ellin Bessner: That is amazing. But unfortunately, her birth family and her two older siblings were murdered.
Amy Fish: Yep. They were murdered at Bełżec, which is a death camp, which means that they didn’t have a chance. I don’t know if your listeners know a lot about the different camps, but this camp was one where every single person that went in was killed—500,000 people in a matter of months. The only two accounts we have are people who escaped right before the train went through the gates. But once the train went through the gates, nobody made it. Even though I went to Solomon Schechter here in Montreal, I went to Herzliya, I went to Brandeis University, my Jewish education is tight, I still did not understand that people were being killed right out of the train. I also didn’t understand that there were vast differences in where you ended up, based on the town that you were sort of recruited from and taken from. And her town of Krosno? They all went directly to Bełżec.
Ellin Bessner: Is there a Holocaust story in your own family? Do you have surviving people?
Amy Fish: I do. I absolutely do. My father’s mother had many siblings. Two of her uncles escaped to Israel. They lost their wives and children in the Holocaust, and they made it all the way to Israel. They were both halutzim who built Haaretz. On my mother’s side, my great-grandmother was put on a boat by herself when she was nine to come here. She thought she was going to meet her sisters in New York. The boat stopped; she got out and they said, “This is not New York; it’s Montreal.” She could not read or write English, and another family had to take her home. What could they do? They couldn’t leave this little nine-year-old Bertha on the side of the road, and they picked her up. I know this from Stanley Diamond. Actually, he told me this story because I don’t know if I mentioned, but I’m related to Stanley, and it’s through this family that I’m related to Stanley. So, my great-grandmother’s sister was his grandmother. One of the people that she was waiting for was Stanley’s bubby. So what Stanley told me is that those parents that were in Poland, they had a disabled child who couldn’t travel and they would not abandon their disabled child. So, they never came. They sent all their kids except for the one that couldn’t leave, and they stayed behind with her.
Ellin Bessner: And what happened to them?
Amy Fish: And they all died. They were all killed.
Ellin Bessner: It is so amazing, Beshert, I don’t know what other words describe it, that he’s related to you. But the most bizarre and amazing thing is that there’s a relationship between Maria and Stanley.
Amy Fish: Yes. So let’s talk about that. In this case, Stanley and Maria are related. 100% mitochondrial DNA match, meaning somewhere on their mother’s line there is a shared ancestor they were not able to figure out. Even Stanley himself could not figure out exactly who that was. It would be many, many generations back. But it is significant that there was a relationship there. And I am related through that same line. So the three of us, even though Stanley and I know how we’re cousins, the three of us do share some kind of common ancestor and common DNA all the way back on our mother’s line.
I also met with two genealogists who have an initiative to help get free tests for Holocaust survivors.
Ellin Bessner: Yeah, tell us more. I was just gonna ask you about that. I thought it’s called The DNA Reunion Project.
Amy Fish: The DNA Reunion Project. This is just a project that I read about, and I called them. We had a lovely meeting over a Zoom interview, and they explained to me about the project. It’s very relevant to what I do because, like I said, having a very intense Jewish education, I did not realize that people are still being reunited. And that is a really important message of this book: that people are still finding each other and finding family members that they were separated from so many years after the Holocaust ended. They haven’t found many matches. I think the numbers are in the 150 kind of range. But still, that’s pretty incredible if you think about people finding long-lost siblings who they thought they would never see again or parents who they never thought they would see again. It’s getting late for that. I think people who were parents in the Holocaust are no longer around. But people like Maria can find cousins and blood relatives that they never knew about. That’s really kind of magical to find.
Ellin Bessner: People at this late stage when most of the survivors are in their 90s. It’s an amazing thing.
Ellin Bessner: I want to end on Maria. The fact that you said a rabbi met with her and told her the news. Does that mean that she doesn’t have to convert anymore, that she’s officially Jewish and now she’s going to live the rest of her life as a Jewish woman?
Amy Fish: Oh, good question. That is a really good question. Okay, so she does not have to convert because she was born Jewish.
But it was difficult to prove. And in order to get reparations from the Holocaust Survivor Claims Conference, you have to prove that you’re Jewish. And she was able to do that. But it involved meetings in Israel and some work with the Chabad rabbi in Omsk. There is an organization in Israel, I think there are several, that help people like her with Russian heritage, because she’s in Siberia now, prove their lineage. And so she was able to do that.
Ellin Bessner: And now that she has this, how has it changed her life and her family? Did she have kids? Does she have a husband or.
Amy Fish: Her husband’s not alive. She has a daughter and a grandson. She still goes by Maria. She did not change her name. The biggest change for her was that she was able to receive some money. And so she’s no longer sort of really stuck. So she’s been able to take a few trips, and for her, that’s been a big thing. She also likes to keep in touch with her family on birthdays and holidays. She has someone to wish that to. She also is involved with the Chabad in her city and she attends some services there. I think for her, it’s really a feeling of contentment and of being settled and of knowing now where her place is and where she fits in. And as she explained it to me, that was the most important outcome of this process for her.
Ellin Bessner: Now, he recently passed away. We did a tribute to him on The CJN Daily’s Honourable Menschen podcast. So we’ll put the link for that in our show notes in case our listeners have missed it. I really want to thank you for this incredible amount of work as a historian myself and using all that stuff as I am on Team Genealogy.
Amy Fish: Thank you very much.
Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN Daily, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Amy Fish’s book, “One in Six Million,” launches on April 1st in Toronto, and in Montreal on April 3rd at the Gelber Conference Centre. You can find out more in our show notes.
The CJN Daily is produced by Zachary Judah Kauffman. The executive producer is Michael Fraiman, editorial director is Marc Weisblott, and our music is by Dov Beck Levine. If you’ve got a DNA story, write to us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.
Show Notes
- Learn more about the book here.
- Read about the late Stanley Diamond’s passion for reuniting Holocaust survivors, in The CJN.
- Hear Stanley Diamond profiled on The CJN Daily’s newest Honourable Menschen podcast.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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