Twin sisters separated at birth who were reunited years later by Tik Tok
[ Twin sisters separated at birth who were reunited years later by Tik tok ]
Amy Khoetia (left) and Anu Sartania (right) didn't know each other until they were 19.
Amy and Anu are twin sisters, but when they were born, they were taken from their mother and sold to two separate families. Years later, they accidentally found out about each other through a TV talent show and Tik Tok.
When he learns more about her past, he learns that she was among the thousands of babies stolen from Georgia hospitals and sold as far back as 2005. Now he has many questions in his mind about what happened to him
Anu admits that she is also very nervous but only because she doesn't know how she will react and if she will be able to control her anger.
This is the end of their long journey. They traveled from Georgia to Germany to find the last piece of the puzzle. She will finally meet her mother, the woman who gave birth to her.
He spent the past two years searching for the truth about what happened to them, and during that time he discovered that there are thousands of people in Georgia who were sold from hospitals as newborns over a period of decades. There have been efforts to investigate at the official level but no one has been held responsible yet.
The story of Amy and Anu discovering each other begins when she was 12 years old.
Amy Khvitya was watching her favorite TV show 'Georgia's Got Talent' at her foster mother's house near the Black Sea. There was a girl dancing who looked just like him. Not only did she look like them, but they were actually the same.
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"I'm scared, so scared," says Amy as she paces nervously through her hotel room in Leipzig, Germany. I couldn't sleep for a whole week. This is the chance that I will finally know what happened to us.'
His twin sister is sitting on a chair watching Tik Tok videos on her phone. "This is the woman who probably sold us out," she says
"Everyone was calling my mother asking, 'Why is Amy dancing with another name?'" she says.
Amy spoke to her family about it, but her mother brushed it off, saying that 'everyone is the same.'
Seven years later in November 2021, Amy posted a video on Tik Tok of her blue hair getting her eyebrows tattooed.
320 km away in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, 19-year-old Anu Sartania's friend sent her a video. He said that he thought it was very interesting that the girl in the video looked like Anu.
Anu tries to find the girl seen in the video on the internet but is unable to find her. He then shared the video in his university's WhatsApp group, thinking that someone there might be able to help him. A member of the group who knew Amy saw the message and connected the two on Facebook.
Amy immediately knew that Anu was the same girl she had seen on 'Georgia's Got Talent' years ago.
She wrote in the message to Anu, "I have been looking for you for a long time," and Anu replied, "Me too."
Over the next few days, they find that they have a lot in common, but they don't understand it. Both of them were born at Kartsakhi Maternity Hospital in West Georgia and their birthdays are a few weeks apart. Also, this hospital no longer exists.
They can't even be sisters, far from being twins. But there were many things that were the same.
They like the same kind of music, love to dance, have the same hair style for days. They also found out that they both have the same genetic disease, the bone disease dysplasia.
It felt like we were solving a mystery together, Amy says.
A week later they met. When Amy appeared from the stairs of a metro station in Tbilisi, she and Anu saw each other face to face for the first time.
'It was like looking in a mirror, the same face, the same voice, I am him, and he is me,' says Amy. That's when they found out that they were twins.
"I don't like hugs but I hugged him," says Anu.
He decided to talk to his family about it and for the first time he came to know the truth. They were adopted separately in 2002, a few months apart.
Amy was very sad to hear this, she felt her whole life was based on a lie. Dressed head-to-toe in black, Amy looks fierce, but she's restlessly fiddling with her cufflinks and wiping a tear from her cheek. "It's a shocking story, but it's true," she says.
"I was very angry with my family, but I wanted this difficult conversation to end so we could all move
on with our lives," Anu said.
When the twin sisters investigated further, they found that the date and other details written on the official birth certificate were wrong
Amy's foster mother says she was unable to have children, so her friend told her there was a baby at a local hospital that her parents didn't want to keep. They have to pay the doctors but they can bring it with them and raise it like their own children.
Anu's mother was told the same story.
Both the adoptive families did not know that the girls were twins and despite paying large sums of money, they said they had no idea that it was an illegal act. The situation in Georgia was bad and because hospital staff were involved in the process, they felt it was not illegal..
Both the families are not ready to say how much they paid.
Unwillingly, the twin sisters wonder if their birth parents sold them for profit.
Amy wanted to meet her real mother to get an answer to this question but Anu was ambivalent about it. He asked Amy, 'Why do you want to meet the person who might have been unfaithful to us?'
Amy finds a Facebook group that aims to reunite children who were illegally adopted as children with their real families in Georgia. He shared his story on this group.
A young woman from Germany responded to her story that her mother gave birth to twin girls in 2002 at the Kirtschke Maternity Hospital, but despite being told at the time that the twins had died, her mother now It is suspected that this was not true.
A DNA test revealed that the girl he met on Facebook is his sister and lives with his birth mother Aza in Germany.
Amy wanted very much to meet Aza but Anu was not too positive about it. "This is the person who probably sold you, she won't tell you the truth," he warned Amy.
Despite this, Anu agrees to accompany Amy to Germany.
The Facebook group used by both of them is called 'Wedzib' which means 'I am looking for'. There are several posts in the group where many mothers have written that hospital staff told them their newborns had died, but when they later looked at the official records, their deaths were not recorded. His children are probably still alive.
Other posts are from children like Amy and Anu who are trying to find their birth parents.
The group has more than 230,000 members and access to DNA information websites has brought this dark chapter of Georgia's history to light.
The group was founded by journalist Tamona Moseridze in 2021 after she learned she was adopted. While cleaning her late mother's house, she found her late mother's birth certificate and it contained incorrect information.
She started the group to find her family, but the group has exposed a child-trafficking scandal that spanned decades and affected tens of thousands of people.
Gurjani Maternity Hospital, which has now been closed, is one of at least 20 hospitals involved in the sale of babies.
They have reunited hundreds of families with estranged children but have not been able to find their families.
Tamona discovered an adoption black market that spread throughout Georgia and lasted from the early 1950s until 2005.
They believe it was run by organized criminal gangs and involved people from all walks of life, from taxi drivers to high-ranking government officials.
"The scale of this crime is unimaginable, up to 100,000 children were stolen," she says.
Tamuna explains that she calculated this figure by counting the number of people who contacted her and comparing cases across the country during that period.
It is impossible to verify the exact figures due to lack of access to documents. Some documents have been lost and others are not being released.
Tamuna says many parents told her that when they asked to see the bodies of their dead children, they were told they had already been buried on the hospital grounds. They have since learned that cemeteries never existed in Georgia hospitals. In other cases, parents were shown dead children who were already in the morgue.
Tamuna says that buying a baby is not cheap, they cost as much as a year's salary. He found that some children were adopted by foreign families, such as in the United States, Canada, Cyprus, Russia, and Ukraine.
In 2005, Georgia changed the country's adoption law and in 2006 it strengthened anti-trafficking laws, making illegal adoptions more difficult.
Irina Otarashvili gave birth to twin boys in 1978 at a maternity hospital in Kvireli, in the foothills of Georgia's Caucasus Mountains. They are also looking for information about this.
The doctors told them that both boys were healthy but they were kept away from them and the reason was never explained to them.
Three days after birth, the doctor told him that he was dead. A doctor said he had breathing problems.
Irina and her husband did not understand this, but she says that in Soviet times, 'you didn't question the administration'. They believed whatever they were told.
They were told to bring a suitcase for their newborn's body in which to put it. He asked the couple to either take the suitcase to the cemetery or bury it in the back garden of their house, which was a common practice for newborns at the time. The doctors told them not to open it as it would be painful for them to see the dead bodies.
But 44 years later, when Irina's daughter Nino saw Timona's Facebook group, she became suspicious.
She thought 'what if our brothers are not really dead?' She decided to dig up the suitcase. "My heart was beating so fast, when we opened it, there were no bones, just rods," she says. We did not understand whether to laugh or cry.
She says local police confirmed the suitcase contained vine branches and no sign of human remains.
They now believe that their estranged brothers may be alive.
At a hotel in Leipzig, Amy and Anu prepare to meet their birth mother. Anu says she has changed her mind and doesn't want to do it anymore. But this is a temporary flurry, she takes a deep breath and decides to continue the process.
Their mother, Aza, anxiously waits for them in the other room. Amy reluctantly opens the door and Anu follows her in, almost pushing her sister into the room.
Aza immediately hugs both the girls. A few minutes passed, no one spoke and they remained side by side.
Tears are running down Amy's face but Ano's face doesn't show any such signs but looks a bit irritated. All three sit and talk alone.
The twin sisters later said that their mother told them that she had fallen ill and gone into a coma after their birth. When they opened their eyes, the hospital staff told them that their babies had died after birth.
He said that meeting Amy and Anu has given a new purpose to his life. Although they are not very close, they keep in touch.
In 2022, the Georgian government launched an investigation into historic child trafficking. He told the BBC he had spoken to more than 40 people but the cases were "too old and the historical data has been lost".
Journalist Tamuna Moseridze says she has given the information to the government, but the government has not said when it will release its report.
The Georgian government tried four times to find out what happened. This includes a 2003 investigation into international child trafficking, which resulted in several arrests but little information was made public. Also in 2015, local media in Georgia reported that an investigation led to the arrest, but later release, of the director of the Rostavi Maternity Hospital, Alexander Barakovi.
The BBC contacted Georgia's Ministry of the Interior for more information on individual cases but was told specific details would not be released for data protection reasons.
Tamuna is now taking the cases of a group of victims to the Georgian courts, along with human rights lawyer Lia Makashavaria. They want the right to access their birth documents, which is currently not possible under Georgia law.
They hope that this will help to suppress the questions that come to their mind. "I always felt that something or someone was missing from my life," says Anu. I used to dream of a little girl dressed in black who would follow me and ask me about my day. That feeling has disappeared since I got Amy.
[ THE END ]
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