LONG SEARCH IS SUCCESSFUL

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32959, 4 July 1972, Page 6

LONG SEARCH IS SUCCESSFUL

6V.Z.P..4.-Reuter — Copyright) . SAN FRANCISCO, July 3. Twenty-seven years of searching Eastern Europe ended yesterday when Mrs Rosie Morita and her daughter, Elizabeth, fell sobbing into each other’s arms. United Press International reported.

Mother and daughter ended a separation that began in the chaotic flood of refugees in the closing days of World War 11.

“It can’t believe it,” said Mrs Morita, who was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of her second marriage. "I have to poke myself with a pin.” Her family, two daughters and a son from her marriage to a nurseryman, Mr Henry Morita, and Elizabeth’s husband, Bela Bartfai, stood aside lin the busy arrival lounge at San Francisco International Airport to give the couple a few moments to hold each other.

Then, in a sudden bustle of activity and laughter, they al! became a happy, jostling group, to go to Mrs Morita’s Santa Clara home 48 miles south of San Francisco.

Mrs Morita, a Hungarian, gave birth to Elizabeth while she was a prisoner at a Nazi child labour centre at Wiener Neustadt, Germany. Her husband, in a separate prison camp died about the same time.

With the advance of American and Russsian troops, the prison guards fled. Mrs Morita, with her daughter, joined other prisoners in heading for the Danube River community of Passau, Germany, near the Austrian border.

Leaving Elizabeth with refugee acquaintances one day, Mrs Morita went out to forage for food and clothing in Passau. She was shot in

both legs by another civilian! in the tense atmosphere of! survival. Elizabeth was nine, months old. Six weeks later, Mrs Morita returned to the house where Elizabeth had been left only to find the child and her friends had disappeared without a trace. Mrs Morita soon after married the American soldier who took her home with him in 1947, assuming they would never see Elizabeth again. But the daughter never gave up the search. She tracked down an uncle in Jugoslavia last year, and finally traced Mrs Morita to Santa Clara. Friends, neighbours and the International Red Cross worked for a year to help Mrs Morita to get a visa for Elizabeth and her husband. The visa will expire on July 27, and Elizabeth will go back to her own two daughters in Budapest. “I think we will do a little celebrating tonight,” Mrs Morita said. “We are all going to be at the same table.”