After 76 years, Hungarian-American veteran finds children from photograph taken during world war

A 96-year-old American veteran with Hungarian origins finally found the three siblings with whom he took a picture in 1944, during the Second World War in a small village in the Apennine Mountains, Northern Italy.

Martin Adler, the American veteran with Hungarian origins, is now 96 years old. His Jewish parents left Hungary after the First World War. In the Second World War, he was fighting on the Italian front line, Telex reports.

Adler was fighting in Italy with the 85th infantry division when he was 20 years old. In the village in the Apennines where they took the photo, they were looking for German soldiers. They heard strange noises coming from a basket at one of the houses and were ready to shoot when a woman started screaming “Children, children!” to stop them.

“Three lovely children were hiding in the basket; one boy and two girls. Luckily, we did not shoot; I would have never forgiven myself,” Adler recalled.

He asked their mother to let him take a photo of the children who agreed and even changed the children’s clothes to make them look better.

“It was a beautiful moment in the midst of the hell of the war,” he said.

In November 1944, Adler got hurt and was taken to a hospital in Naples. He returned to America in the spring of 1945. It was his Christmas wish to find the children from the photograph.

Adler has been looking for years now for the three siblings with whom he took the picture in a small Italian village in the Apennine Mountains, but it was difficult to find them since he could not recall the name of the village.

The three siblings, Bruno (83), Mafalda (81), and Guiliana Naldi (79), and Adler found each other after the black and white photograph about Adler and the children was published on the internet by journalist Matteo Incerti who wanted to help.

Bruno Naldi called Adler three days after the photograph was published. He told Adler that his two sisters are alive, too, and one of them even remembered that the soldiers were offering them chocolate.

They had a meeting through a video call – the siblings were calling from near Bologna while Adler was on the phone from Florida.

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Source: Telex