Belarusian Woman Finds Parents after Internet Search

“A woman whose father lost her on a train as a four-year-old has been reunited with her parents two decades later.

Yulia Gorina, 24, was raised by adoptive parents after she mysteriously managed to cross from Belarus into Russia, and her real family could not be traced.

Twenty years later she found her parents after her new boyfriend Ilya Kryukov, 31, did a simple internet search.

Heartwarming pictures show Yulia after she was reunited with her mother and the father who lost her when he dozed off to sleep on a 60 mile train journey from Minsk to Asipovichy.

A DNA test has now proved that she is the daughter of Viktor and Lyudmila Moiseenko – and her father has ‘begged her forgiveness’ for losing her.

Her parents now in their late 50s searched frantically for their lost child at the time, as did local police, but ended up under suspicion of killing the girl.

As recently as 2017 when police reopened the case, they underwent lie detector tests which they both passed.

It remains unclear how Yulia got from Asipovichy to Ryazan, except she has a memory of a train journey.

A couple – who possibly kidnapped the lost girl – was believed to have been involved. ‘I do believe it’s all true now,’ said Yulia after finding and hugging her real parents.

‘It was proved by a DNA test, but it was clear even before, we are so much alike, as soon as we saw the photographs of each other.

‘Nobody had any doubts – we are one family.

‘I found not only my mother and father in Belarus, but also brother Dmitry and elder sister Nadezhda (Nadya).’

Yulia still lives in Ryazan where she was found on a railway siding in 1999. It is some 550 miles from Asipovichy where she was lost.

Her real mother Lyudmila said: ‘Twenty years is like a whole life, but we never lost hope, we believed – and so we found each other.’

The reunion was in a police station in Marjina Horka settlement. ‘We were all in tears,’ said Yulia.

‘We could not even talk, we only cried and hugged each other.

‘My parents have told me that they were searching for me for a long time, that they believed they would find me one day.

‘My mother could not stop hugging me, she made me sit on her lap as if I was a little girl.

‘We were chatting till 3 am, and then Ilya and I had to go back to Russia – my daughter was waiting for me.’

Before leaving she walked with her father around the station where the train ended its journey in 1999.

‘Father begged me to forgive him for what happened,’ she said.

‘Of course I do.

‘We were at the station where I went missing, we all walked around it, in floods of tears.’

There were three weeks between Yulia being lost and her discovery by a policeman in Ryazan on 21 October 1999.

She recalled as a child how she was travelling with a man and woman who were hiding from police.

‘We slept in some abandoned houses,’ she said.

‘I do not remember all this now.

‘I was told I did speak with a Belarus accent, using local words for vegetables like potatoes and onions but I do not know why Russian policemen did not pay any attention to it when they were searching for my family.’

The police sent her to an orphanage and after a fruitless search in Russia for her family, she was given up for adoption by March the following year to Irina and Oleg who had two sons and wanted a daughter.

Yulia says now: ‘I was always searching for my family, checking internet, trying to browse…but I found nothing.’

She told Ilya about her story – and miraculously he found details of a girl lost in Belarus shortly before Yulia was found in Russia.

‘I began to read and realised that so many facts were the same, so my tears were running,’ she said.

‘When I was found, they put 1 October as my birthday in the documents – it was the day when I was lost.’

After several false starts they made contact via police in Pukhovichesky.

She tried to contact her father on social media – but he didn’t reply. She didn’t know this was because he didn’t know how to text.

‘Why didn’t I call them? I knew that by then police told them about me but I was still so deeply worried about the first chat. For me and for them it was nerve-wracking.

‘So I messaged Dad and sat down waiting for his reply. Minutes turned to hours but he stayed quiet.

‘I was dying from worry that he wasn’t replying, but later I learned that he simply didn’t know how to text.’

Then a woman called saying: ‘Hello, my name is Nadya.

‘I am your big sister and I am so happy that we found you.’

Yulia said: ‘Then she passed the phone to Mum, who burst into tears straight away.

‘She asked me to say the biggest possible thank you to my foster parents for taking care of me during all these years.

‘We are now constantly in touch with my big sister, we are messaging each other and sending pictures.’

She said; ‘I knew that they were desperate to hear me calling them ‘mama’ and ‘papa’, who wouldn’t want it.

‘I am a mother myself, and I can feel completely what heartbreak they went through. I wouldn’t wish this to anyone.’

Yulia said a catastrophic combination of coincidences led to her not being found.

‘They were looking for me in Belarus and didn’t think that I might have been in Russia.

‘In Russia they didn’t think that I could have been from Belarus.’

She crossed a border where at the time passports were not required.

‘It’s a great pity that people who found me and were walking me around before I was taken into foster care didn’t report their find to police,’ she said.

‘I’v no clue how I got to Ryazan, I simply can’t imagine it. I remember going on a train but all memories are vague.’

Nothing is known about the couple who presumably took her to Russia rather than report her to local police.

Lyudmila told how she and Viktor had hunted for their missing daughter.

‘For days we were searching ourselves, taking every train from Minsk to Asipovichy and back, asking passengers if they had seen Yulia, checking wells, shops, deserted houses, everything.,’ she said.

‘It was impossibly painful to live all these years with the heartache of not knowing what happened to our daughter. It was beyond awful.’

They eventually moved house.

‘We couldn’t stay in the house where just days ago she was laughing and playing.

‘We couldn’t walk the same roads and hated to be anywhere near the railway. We both hate seeing trains.

‘In the end we moved the house because staying there in the same place by that railway.

‘Two years after she went missing we left to another area where there are no trains and no stations.’

A report in 2017 quoted Lyudmila saying: ‘We were asked to go through a lie detector test to avoid any suspicions.

‘We did so. I am waiting for Yulia, she is now 22 years old, I believe that she is alive and that we will see her again.'”

Woman who was lost by her family aged four when her father fell asleep on a train in Belarus is reunited with her parents TWENTY YEARS later after new boyfriend Googled ‘train girl’
[Daily Mail 9/3/19 by Will Stewart]

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