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LAKE CRYSTAL, Minn. (WCCO) ― It took six decades for a World War II Holocaust story to find a happy ending in a southwestern Minnesota town. It is not unlike the story of Anne Frank, who wrote her famous diary while hiding from Nazis in Amsterdam.

This story starts in another Dutch town, about 100 miles north, and leads to Lake Crystal, Minn.

"This is how I remember Mia," said Wilma Stienstra, holding a picture of her holding a small child.

For most of her 75 years, Stienstra has kept hope locked deep inside her heart. She hoped that a girl she once called her baby sister was still alive.

"And you know why we couldn't keep her," said Stienstra. The picture was taken in 1943, during World War II. Stienstra was 11. Her country is under Nazi control and Jews were being exterminated.

On a pitch black night in the northern town of Ijlst, Stienstra heard a commotion from her bedroom. A little Jewish girl known only as Mia had been smuggled into her home.

"She was crying 'mommy, mommy, mommy,'" Stienstra remembered.

Mia was two-and-a-half. Her mother had handed her to the Dutch resistance before being shipped off to a concentration camp.

Stienstra's strict Protestant family was already in danger for harboring two other Jews upstairs, but her younger sister had died of an illness a year earlier. Mia became the new sister and Stienstra was her guardian in hiding.

"My child," Stienstra remembered. "I had to wash her up, bring her to bed, take care of her."

The two played together every day for more than two years, avoiding German roundups with help from neighbors.

When the war ends, an aunt of Mia's comes to take her away, hoping to reunite her with her mother. Though Stienstra's parents are against it, Mia is whisked away.

"I didn't want anybody to see my tears, but I cried very hard," Stienstra said. "She was my sister, my little sister."

Mia never found her mother. She had been killed in a Nazi death camp. After she was taken from Stienstra's family, Mia caught tuberculosis and her aunt abandoned her at a sanatorium to waste away alone.

Stienstra grew up to marry her high school sweetheart. She followed him to Canada and then to the United States where they raised their family. The family moved around a lot, but they retired to a brick house in Lake Crystal.

In January, Stienstra got a phone call from someone she hadn't spoken to in 63 years: Mia.

"We were both very emotional, and I told her when she came, how she was crying for her mother and she said, 'Now I have to cry,'" Stienstra said.

Mia survived the post-war chaos. She's now 67 and lives in Israel with her three children and seven grandchildren. A photo of Stienstra made its way to Mia after her aunt's death. Scribbled on the back were the names of a town and a family.

The photo started a quest and Mia set out to thank the people who risked everything to give her a life. The Israeli government helped get Mia's story on Dutch television. Stienstra's brothers saw it and passed along her phone number. Mia then made the call.

"I was very happy to talk with her and to say her how much I feel for her, and say thank you for all the things you did for me," Mia said.

For 20 minutes, they were sisters again.

"We both cried," Stienstra said. "I told her what she was like as a child and that she was my little sister and that I felt so bad that she had left."

"I was only thinking that I wanted to see her very much and to hold her and to talk with her again and again," Mia said.

"And even now, Mia is 67 years old, I am 75 years old and she is still that little child and I am again 11," Stienstra said.

The two now talk on the phone nearly every week. They would like to meet in person some day, but Stienstra isn't healthy enough to travel and Mia can't afford the trip.

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