One of the great tools for healing from trauma is to realize that if situations and circumstances had been reversed, you likely would have been the perpetrator.
It sounded like a tabloid headline: Identical twins separated after birth. One grew up Jewish, the other a Nazi.
But the story of Jack Yufe and his brother was not just about their stark differences.
After decades and oceans apart, the men came together as adults to learn they dressed alike, walked alike, and had the same hot temper and quirks, including a fondness for scaring others with an explosively loud sneeze.
They both read books from back to front, loved butter and spicy food and flushed the toilet before they used it.
“They were a great example of how twins, despite different environments, ended up being very much alike,” said Cal State Fullerton psychology professor Nancy Segal, who studied the brothers as part of a well-known Minnesota research project on separated twins.
Yufe, a San Ysidro businessman, died Monday in a San Diego hospital from stomach cancer, his family said. He was 82.
Of 137 pairs of separated twins in the two-decade University of Minnesota study, 56 were fraternal and 81 were identical. Yufe and his brother, Oskar Stohr, stood out because of their dramatically dissimilar backgrounds.
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on Jan. 16, 1933, they were 6 months old when their parents split up.
Oskar went to Germany with his Catholic mother, Elizabeth, and grew up as the Nazis rose to power. Like his fellow students, he greeted the school principal with “Heil, Hitler,” and was warned by his grandmother to never let on that his father, Joseph, was Jewish. As an act of survival, Oskar joined the Hitler Youth movement.
Years later, he confessed that he had dreamed that he shot down his twin in an aerial dogfight. Jack had a similar nightmare about killing Oskar with a bayonet.
For Jack, however, the war was a distant threat, experienced mainly through newsreels he saw growing up in Trinidad with their father. His childhood was difficult in other ways.
“As a white, red-headed boy in a predominantly black and Indian culture, he stood out a lot and was beat up a lot,” said his son, Kenneth. “He was constantly having to prove himself.” Luckily, he was highly competitive and and excelled athletically.
Jack knew he was Jewish but didn’t feel the weight of that identity until he was 15 and was sent to Venezuela to live with an aunt who had been in Dachau and was the only European relative on his father’s side to survive the Holocaust.
She urged Jack to move to Israel and his father agreed that it would be good for him. Jack reluctantly emigrated at 16 and served a stint in the Israeli navy.
