“It was like looking in a mirror, exactly the same face, exactly the same voice. I am her and she is me”, said the young woman. Georgian Amy Khvitia the BBC about his first meeting with his sister Sartania Year.
The young women are identical twins, but they only discovered it two years ago. Her biological mother fell into a coma after she was born. When she woke up, hospital staff told her that her babies had died.
But it was actually Amy and Ano sold. She couldn't have children, the woman who raised Amy later said. A friend warned her that there was an unwanted baby at the local hospital. She paid the doctors money—she wouldn't say how much—and raised Amy as her own daughter. Ano's story is similar.
Amy saw “Doppelganger” dancing at a talent show
Amy first became suspicious at age 12 while watching her favorite show”Georgia's next talent” seen. Because there was a girl dancing there who looked exactly like her: Year. After the show aired, there were calls to her family: “Why is Amy dancing under a different name?” they asked. Her mother I simply said that everyone has a double.
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Seven years later, in 2021, Amy got her eyebrows pierced and posted a video on TikTok. More than 300 kilometers away, a friend sent the recording to Ano. “I thought it was cool that she looked like me,” she says. After that, she tried to somehow find the girl in the video. It finally worked through a WhatsApp group at her university – someone who knew Amy put her in touch.
“I've been looking for you for so long”
Amy immediately thought Ano must be the girl she saw on TV when she was 12. “I've been looking for you for so long!” she wrote. “Me too,” replied Ano. They met and realized that they weren't just physically alike: they liked the same music, danced, had the same bone disease and even had the same hairstyle.
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The two discovered that their birth certificates and dates of birth, which were a few weeks apart, were fake – and they are actually twins.
They met their biological sister through a Facebook group
Amy and Ano then began looking for their biological parents. They found a Facebook group where people with similar stories to theirs were looking for their loved ones and posting in it. A woman from Germany contacted them – Amy and Ano's biological sister. So the twins traveled to Leipzig and met their biological mother. After their birth, she discovered that her children's deaths had not been registered and that, therefore, they could still be alive. Amy and Ano are not close to their mother today, but they still keep in touch with each other.
“Up to 100,000 babies stolen”
The Facebook group through which the two found their sister has more than 230,000 members. A journalist named Tamuna Museridzeshe founded in 2021 and uncovered a decades-old child trafficking scandal – tens of thousands of people are said to have been affected.
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“The scale is unimaginable; up to 100,000 babies were stolen. It was a system,” says Museridze. She is also looking for her biological parents, but so far without success.