Amy was 12 when she saw a girl dancing on TV. She didn’t look like her. It was her.
She was at her godmother’s house near the Black Sea, watching Georgia’s Got Talent. Her mother brushed it off: “Everyone has a double”. Amy was left wondering.
Seven years later, in November 2021, she posted a TikTok video with blue hair, getting an eyebrow piercing. In Tbilisi, 320 kilometers away, a friend sent it to 19-year-old Ano Sartania. Ano thought it was amazing that the girl looked so much like her.
A week later, the two young women arranged to meet at Rustaveli metro station. “It was like looking in a mirror, exactly the same face, exactly the same voice. I am her and she is me”, says Amy.
Then the numbers that didn’t add up started to emerge. They had been born in 2002 at the same maternity hospital, in Kirtskhi, but their birth certificates had different dates. On paper, they couldn’t be sisters. They also had the same bone disease.
When they asked their adoptive parents, each family told the same story. A friend who worked at the place where they were born told them about an unwanted baby at the hospital. They paid the doctors and took the baby away. Neither knew she had a twin.
One question remained unanswered: who had sold them? Amy posted her case in Vedzeb, a Facebook group whose name means “I’m looking for”. A young German woman named Aza Shoni replied that her mother had given birth to twins in Kirtskhi that same year, and had been told they had died. All three took a DNA test, which confirmed that they were sisters.
Almost twenty years later, in a hotel in Leipzig, Aza hugged them, one on each side. No one spoke for minutes. According to the twins, their biological mother had fallen into a coma after giving birth and, when she woke up, was told that her babies were no longer alive.
Vedzeb has more than 230.000 members. Its founder, journalist Tamuna Museridze, estimates that up to 100.000 babies were taken from hospitals and sold between the 50s and 2005. The figure cannot be verified because the documents are missing.
No one has been held accountable yet.
Ano says that as a child she dreamed of a girl dressed in black who followed her and asked her about her day. Those dreams stopped the day she found Amy.
