Georgia’s stolen children Twins sold at birth reunited by TikTok video

Georgia’s stolen children Twins sold at birth reunited by TikTok video

Amy and Ano are identical twins, but just after they were born they. were taken from their mother and sold to separate families. Years later, they discovered each other by chance thanks to a TV talent show and a TikTok video. As they delved into their past, they realised they were among thousands of babies in Georgia stolen from hospitals and sold, some as recently as 2005. Now they want answers.

Amy is pacing up and down in a hotel room in Leipzig. “I’m scared, really scared,” she says, fidgeting nervously. “I haven’t slept all week. This is my chance to finally get some answers about what happened to us.”

Her twin sister, Ano, sits in an armchair, watching TikTok videos on her phone. “This is the woman that could have sold us,” she says, rolling her eyes. Ano admits she is nervous too, but only because she doesn’t know how she will react and if she will be able to control her anger.

It’s the end of a long journey. They have travelled from Georgia to Germany, in the hope of finding the missing piece of the puzzle. They are finally meeting their birth mother.

For the past two years they have been building a picture of what happened. As they unravelled the truth, they realised there were tens of thousands of other people in Georgia who had also been taken from hospitals as babies and sold over the decades. Despite official attempts to investigate what happened, nobody has been held to account yet.

The story of how Amy and Ano discovered each other starts when they were 12.

Amy Khvitia was at her godmother’s house near the Black Sea watching her favourite TV programme, Georgia’s Got Talent. There was a girl dancing the jive who looked exactly like her. Not just like
her, in fact, identical.
Amy (L) aged 12 and Ano (R) also aged 12 during her performance on Georgia’s Got Talent (BBC)
“Everyone was calling my mum and asking: ‘Why is Amy dancing under another name?'” she says.

Amy mentioned it to her family but they brushed it off. “Everyone has a doppelganger,” her mother said.

Seven years later, in November 2021, Amy posted a video of herself with blue hair getting her eyebrow pierced on TikTok.

Two hundred miles (320km) away in Tbilisi, another 19-year-old, Ano Sartania, was sent the video by a friend. She thought it was “cool that she looks like me”.

Ano tried to trace the girl with the pierced eyebrow online but couldn’t find her, so she shared the video on a university WhatsApp group to see if anyone could help. Someone who knew Amy saw the message and connected them on Facebook.

Amy instantly knew Ano was the girl she had seen all those years ago on Georgia’s Got Talent.

“I have been looking for you for so long!” she messaged. “Me too,” replied Ano.

Over the next few days, they discovered they had a lot in common, but not all of it made sense. They were both born in Kirtskhi maternity hospital – which no longer exists – in western Georgia but, according to their birth certificates, their birthdays were a couple of weeks apart.

They couldn’t be sisters, much less twins. But there were too many similarities.They liked the same music, they both loved dancing and even had the same hairstyle. They discovered they had the same genetic disease, a bone disorder called dysplasia.

It felt like they were unravelling a mystery together. “Every time I learned something new about Ano, things got stranger,” says Amy.

They arranged to meet and a week later, as Amy approached the top of the escalator at Rustaveli metro station in Tbilisi, she and Ano saw each other in the flesh for the very first time. “It was like looking in a mirror, the exact same face, exact same voice. I am her and she is me,” says Amy. She knew then that they were twins.

“I don’t like hugs, but I hugged her,” says Ano.

They decided to confront their families and for the first time they learned the truth. They had been adopted, separately, a few weeks apart in 2002.
Amy was upset and felt her whole life had been a lie. Dressed head to toe in black she looks tough, but she fiddles with her studded choker nervously and wipes a mascara-stained tear away from her cheek. “It’s a crazy story,” she says. “But it’s true.”

Ano was “angry and upset with my family, but I just wanted the difficult conversations to be over so that we could all move on”.
Digging deeper, the twins found the details on their official birth certificates, including the date they were born, were wrong.
Unable to have children, Amy’s mother says a friend told her there was an unwanted baby at the local hospital. She would need to pay the doctors but she could take her home and raise her as her own.
Ano’s mother was told the same story.
Neither of the adoptive families knew the girls were twins and despite paying a lot of money to adopt their daughters, they say they hadn’t realised it was illegal. Georgia was going through a period of turmoil and as hospital staff were involved they thought