When the twins began digging into their past two years ago, they discovered their names were among thousands of babies stolen from hospitals and sold in Georgia over the decades.
The first discovery about each other took place when the twins were 12 years old. Amy was watching a talent show on TV and a girl who looked identical to her appeared on the show.
– Everyone called my mother and asked: “Why is Amy dancing under a different name?”, she tells the BBC.
In November 2021, seven years later, Amy posted a video of herself on Tiktok. Something that instead made the twin sister Ano raise her eyebrows. At the time, 19-year-old Ano had the video sent to her by a friend who reacted to the fact that Amy looked exactly like her.
“I’ve been looking for you for so long”
Ano then tried to find the girl in the video. After she shared the video on a WhatsApp group, the breakthrough came. Someone recognized the girl Ano was calling for and connected them.
When Amy was approached by Ano, she immediately recognized her as the girl she had seen on the TV talent show years before.
“I’ve been looking for you for so long,” Amy wrote in a heartbreaking message.
Confronted the families
The twins discovered they had a lot in common. Both were born in the same defunct west Georgia hospital and had the same genetic bone disease.
– Every time I learned something new about Ano, things got weirder, says Amy.
A week later they met for the first time in person. A meeting that led them to decide to confront their families.
– It was like looking in a mirror, exactly the same face, exactly the same voice. I am her and she is me, says Amy.
Paid large sums of money
It then became clear that the details on their official birth certificates, including the date they were born, were incorrect and that they had been adopted separately in 2002, a few weeks apart.
The parents who had adopted the respective children had been told that there was an unwanted baby at the local hospital. The families who paid large sums of money for the adoptions did not know they were twins and did not realize it was illegal.
Adopted illegally at birth – said babies died
Amy shared the twins’ story in a Facebook group aimed at reuniting Georgian families with children suspected of being adopted illegally at birth. Then a young woman in Germany replied that her mother had given birth to twin girls in the same hospital in 2002.
After DNA tests, it was clear that the young woman was Amy and Ano’s sister. The twins decided in 2023 to go to Germany together to meet their biological mother.
– I haven’t slept all week. This is my chance to finally get some answers about what happened to us, Amy says.
Their biological mother, Aza, tells the twins that she fell ill after giving birth and ended up in a coma. When she woke up, the hospital staff had told her that the babies had died shortly after they were born.
In 2022, the government of Georgia launched an investigation into historical child trafficking.