Жительница Ванкуверского острова нашла пропавшую семью и раскрыла трагическую историю предков

Vancouver Islander finally finds the answers about her lost family she always wanted Published 11:40 am Thursday, September 3, 2026 Kim Brands, also known as Kerashima, finally found something she had been looking for a long time. Family. Brands’ mother died when Brands was 12. During that time, Brands herself was often at the Royal Jubilee and Queen Alexandra hospitals getting surgeries. Her father was not in the picture, so Brands went to live with one of her mother’s friends, while her brother, six years older, went his own way. However, Brands didn’t know much about either side of her parents’ family, other than what she said were “breadcrumbs” given to her. “I was told that my mom was Jewish, (and) our family was pretty much murdered in the Holocaust,” Brands said. Most of these breadcrumbs came from her mother’s friend who took her in and raised her. She did meet her maternal grandparents, but never got the full story, and the Holocaust wasn’t talked about that much. “So, we didn’t really know. I just had information; my brother had some information,” she said. “I decided to get a DNA test and go, ‘Let’s find out.” So, it turns out that yes, we’re Jewish, and yes, I found out that my grandfather’s family had pretty much all been taken to different concentration camps and died..” She gave up. But things changed in March of this year. She got a letter asking if she knew Sonja Solomons and Brian Clayton Brands. She responded to the letter, letting the writer know Brian was her brother and Sonja was her mother. “Oh my gosh, we have a story for you,” was the reply. A family in the Netherlands was also looking for their family. Maria Nieuwhof-De Rooij died in 1997 at Zandhove, a care centre, in Spanbroek, a small city in the Dutch province of North Holland. She was 80 years old. Her family found two things while cleaning out her room: an album of poetry written by Sonja Solomons and a photo album by Dora Ihle and Joel Solomons. The two artifacts were carefully preserved, but the family had never known about them. The albums were in the possession of Nieuwhof-De Rooij’s son, Menno Nieuwhoeven, and his wife, Truus, and remained untouched for several years until their daughter, Chantal Heus, asked about them. Her question launched a family investigation into finding out more about the Solomons and a family history, which included digging into the National Archives, Open Archives, various city archives in the Netherlands and Germany, and more. An orphan from Backnang, Germany, Dora Ihle, was taken in by a Dutch family when she was 19. The family, with 13 children, was the De Rooij family based in North Holland’s Castricum. One of the children was Nieuwhof-De Rooij. Ihle met Joel Solomons and married in 1930 in Amsterdam. The couple had two children, Sonja and William. Meanwhile over the border in Germany, the Nazi Party was on the rise, leading to Hitler’s consolidation of power and campaign of violence against Europe’s Jewish population, blaming them and socialists for the country’s defeat in the First World War, while promoting an “Aryan” race, reversing territorial loss from the First World War, and securing Lebensraum (living space). The persecution of the German Jewish population started almost immediately. They were banned or restricted from civil service and other professions, and it only got worse. The Nuremberg Laws, introduced on Sept. 15, 1935, criminalized marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, restricted economic activity, forced Jewish students out of the school system, and eventually barred Jews from more occupations; businesses were expropriated. In 1928, the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) took place on Nov. 9 to 10, 1938, with over 7,500 Jewish shops looted, more than 1,000 synagogues damaged or destroyed, 90 Jews murdered, and 30,000 Jewish men arrested. The Second World War also saw the start of the Holocaust in 1941, when Nazi Germany began a mass campaign of exterminating Jewish populations in occupied territories, including the Netherlands. “I thought that my grandfather didn’t go to a concentration camp because he was married to a German,” said Brands. However, Joel Solomons did go to a concentration camp. Solomons survived, though, with Ihle’s German nationality suspected as a contributing factor. Many of Solomons’ family members were also sent to camps and did not survive. “Then I thought he was the only member, and it’s like I didn’t think there were even brothers or sisters, like it was just my Oma (granny) and Opa (grandpa). I thought, that’s it. But then I found out he had brothers and sisters, and his youngest sister survived. That was amazing.” Following the war, Solomons and Ihle settled in Amsterdam-Oost, where Solomons worked as a goldsmith. William emigrated to the United States, and Sonja moved to Canada with her husband, Gordon Brands, after their marriage in 1956. Brands met her grandparents, Ihle and Solomons, when she was six years old on a trip to Amsterdam. But after the death of her mother, she lost all contact. On March 8, Brands received an email in Dutch from Heus, jumpstarting the rekindling of families and the fulfilment of a family history that Brands had pieces of, which she called breadcrumbs. It was all thanks to the genealogy website MyHeritage, to which both Brands and Heus had uploaded their DNA. Brands said she is now connected to 41,000 people on the website. “It just blows my mind,” said Brands. “I had basically given up. Like it was so depressing to find out that nearly every single member of my mom’s family and extended family had all died. Every time a new thing would come along, and it would say this person died at this concentration camp. I was just… it was too depressing, so I said I was done.” Heus and Neuwhoven are coming to meet Brands in the Comox Valley on Sept. 12 to hand over the book of poetry and the book of photographs, lost to the descendants of Joel and Dora Solomons for almost a century. She plans on showing them the Island before they leave on Sept. 22. Brands and Heus have been corresponding and emailing “like crazy every day” since the initial contact, and have had video calls with Heus’ parents who remembered Sonja and her parents, including Solomons’ sister who died one month after Heus contacted Brands. The two were able to connect before she passed. Brands has learned more about her family. She has a relative, now 80, who is involved in a synagogue in the Netherlands. She is also now in contact with her. Brands is also planning a visit to the Netherlands and is brushing up on her Dutch. “It’s been a wild ride. Sometimes I’m happy crying, sometimes I’m sad crying when they send me pictures. All of us are so excited, and my friends are so excited to meet them,” she said. “We’re going to have a great time.”