Mother and daughter reunite in Toronto after 80 years of separation
Gerda Cole, a 98-year-old Ontario woman, says she received the best Mother’s Day present she could ever imagine after seeing her daughter again for the first time in eighty years.
As a young Jewish girl, Cole escaped persecution in her native Vienna, Austria in 1939 at the start of Second World War. Her parents sent her alone on a children’s transport to England.
At age 18, she gave birth to her daughter, Sonya Grist, in 1942, but due to her economic situation, she was advised by the refugee committee in England to place her baby for adoption, and was told not to have any further contact with the child.
Cole and her daughter had been separated for 80 years since.
On Saturday, the two held tightly onto each other during the reunion. Cole squealed in excitement and repeated the words “80 years” in bewilderment. Jokingly, her daughter retorted, “Don’t emphasize my age.”
“Thank you all for coming and sharing this wonderful experience with me. I am so overjoyed to be able to say, ‘my daughter,’” Cole said on 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 Toronto long-term care home. He said the whole time he was just simply hoping to find the name and background of his birth grandmother.
Gerda Cole was reunited with her daughter Sonya Grist and grandson Stephen Grist during Cole's 98th birthday party.
“I was fully expecting to find eventually some record of death,” he said on Saturday. “In the end, I found Gerda’s stepson, and they told me that Gerda is alive and well and living in a home in Canada. That was such a shock in the system. It 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 that because of the pandemic, but here we are now.”
Sonya 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 this computer doesn’t like me.”
“It was exactly something I would say,” she said with a laugh.
The mother and daughter spent the rest of the day talking and dancing with one another during the reunion party. It was a moment they both would always treasure.
“Don’t wait until tomorrow before it is too late, if you want to live, live now, not tomorrow or the day after,” Cole said on Saturday. “It’s all the advice I have to give.”
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
BREAKING Federal employees will be required to spend 3 days a week in the office
Starting in September, public servants in the core public administration will be required to work in the office a minimum of three days a week. The Treasury Board Secretariat says executives will need to be in the office four days per week.
Concerns about plexiglass prompt inspections at some Loblaws locations in Ottawa
Inspections are underway at more than one Loblaws location in Ottawa after complaints were filed about tall plexiglass barriers.
OPP officer said 'someone's going to get hurt' before wrong-way Hwy. 401 crash
As multiple Durham police cruisers were chasing a robbery suspect on the wrong side of Highway 401 Monday night, an Ontario Provincial Police officer shared his concerns, telling a dispatcher, "Someone's going to get hurt."
Canada's most wanted fugitive arrested in P.E.I. in connection with Toronto homicide
A suspect in a fatal shooting in Toronto’s east end last summer has been arrested in Charlottetown, just one week after he topped a list of Canada’s most wanted fugitives.
Poilievre returns to House unrepentant for calling Trudeau 'wacko,' Speaker not resigning
An unrepentant Pierre Poilievre returned to the House of Commons on Wednesday to pepper the prime minister about his drug decriminalization policies after being booted the day prior for refusing to take back calling Justin Trudeau 'wacko' over his approach to the issue.
Five human skeletons, missing hands and feet, found outside house of Nazi leader Hermann Göring
Archeologists have unearthed the skeletons of five people, missing their hands and feet, at a former Nazi military base in Poland.
Toddler of Phoenix first responder dies after bounce house goes airborne
A two-year-old child died after a strong gust of wind sent the bounce house he was in airborne and into a neighbouring lot in central Arizona, the Pinal County Sheriff's Office said.
Plane overshoots runway at airport in St. John's, N.L., no injuries reported
Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada are headed to St. John's, N.L., after a plane overshot a runway at the city's airport this afternoon.
A teen was found buried in a basement in New York. An engraved ring helped police learn her identity two decades later
For more than two decades, the unknown victim was nicknamed "Midtown Jane Doe" because she was found in the Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood of New York City. But this week, investigators finally revealed her identity.