TBILISI, Georgia: Amy and Ano are identical twins, but were taken from their mother and sold to separate families just after they were born.
Years later, they found each other by chance thanks to a TV talent show and a TikTok video. Delving into their past, they realized they were among thousands of children in Georgia stolen from hospitals and sold, some as recently as 2005.
It’s the end of a long journey. They traveled from Georgia to Germany in hopes of finding the missing piece of the puzzle. They finally met their mother.
They spent the last two years building a picture of what happened. When they found the truth, they realized that there were tens of thousands of other people in Georgia who had also been taken from hospitals as children and sold over the decades.
Despite official attempts to investigate what happened, no one has yet been held accountable.
The story of how Amy and Ano discovered each other begins when they were 12.
Amy Khvitia was at her godmother’s house near the Black Sea watching her favorite TV show Georgia’s Got Talent. A girl who looked exactly like her was dancing the jive. Not just like her, identical in fact.
“Everyone was calling my mom and asking, ‘Why is Amy dancing under a different 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 getting her eyebrows pierced on TikTok.
Two hundred miles (320 km) away in Tbilisi, another 19-year-old, Ano Sartania, sent a video from a friend. She thought it was “cool that he looks like me”.
Yes, she tried to trace the girl with the pierced eyebrow online but couldn’t find her, so she shared the video on the university’s WhatsApp group to see if anyone could help. Someone who knew Amy saw the message and connected them on Facebook.
Amy knew immediately that Ano was the girl she saw all those years ago on Georgia’s Got Talent.
“I’ve been looking for you for so long!” she sent a message. “Me too,” replied Yes.
Over the next few days, they discovered they had a lot in common, but not everything made sense.
Both were born in the Kirtskhi maternity hospital – which no longer exists – in western Georgia, but according to their birth certificates, their birthdays were weeks apart.
They couldn’t be sisters, let alone twins. But the similarities were too many.
They liked the same music, both loved to dance and even had the same hairstyle. They discovered they had the same genetic disease, a bone disorder called dysplasia.
It felt like they were unraveling a mystery together. “Every time I learned something new about Ano, things got weirder,” says Amy.
They set up a meeting, and a week later, as Amy neared the top of the escalator at Rustaveli Metro Station in Tbilisi, she and Ano saw each other in person for the first time.
“It was like looking in a mirror, exactly the same face, exactly the same voice. I’m her and she’s me,” Amy says. That’s when she knew they were twins.
“I don’t like hugs, but I hugged her,” says Ano.
They decided to confront their families and learned the truth for the first time. They were adopted separately, a few weeks apart in 2002.
Amy was upset and felt like her whole life was a lie. Dressed head-to-toe in black, she looks fierce, but nervously fiddles with a studded choker and wipes a tear from her cheek with smeared mascara. “It’s a crazy story,” he says. “But it is true.”
Yes, she was “angry and upset with my family, but I just wanted the tough conversations to be over so we could all move on”.
When the twins dug deeper, they discovered that the details on their official birth certificates, including their date of birth, were wrong.
Amy’s mother, who cannot have children, says a friend told her there was an unwanted baby at a local hospital. She would have to pay the doctors, but she could take her home and raise her as her own.
Mother Ano was told the same story.
None of the adoptive families knew the girls were twins, and although they paid a lot of money to adopt their daughters, they say they didn’t realize it was illegal. Georgia was going through a period of turmoil and the hospital staff saw it as legitimate.
Neither family disclosed how much money was exchanged.
The twins couldn’t help but wonder if their biological parents had sold them for profit.
Amy wanted to look for their birth mother to find out, but Ano wasn’t sure. “Why do you want to meet the person who could have betrayed us?” she asked.
Amy found a Facebook group dedicated to reuniting Georgia families with children suspected of illegal birth adoption and shared their story.
A young woman from Germany replied that her mother had given birth to twins in the Kirtskhi maternity hospital in 2002 and that although she had been told they had died, she now had some doubts.
DNA tests revealed that the girl from the Facebook group was their sister and lived with their birth mother Aza in Germany.
Amy was desperate to meet Aza, but Ano was more skeptical. “This is the person who could have sold you, he won’t tell you the truth,” she warned. Even so, she agreed to go with Amy to Germany to support her.
The Facebook group the twins used, Vedzeb, means “I’m looking” in Georgian. He has countless posts from mothers who say they were told by hospital staff that their children had died, only to later find out that the deaths had not been recorded and their children could still be alive.
Other posts are from children like Amy and Ano who are looking for their parents.
The group has more than 230,000 members and, along with access to the DNA website, has opened wide a dark chapter in Georgia’s history.
It was founded by journalist Tamuna Museridze in 2021 after she found out she was adopted. She found her birth certificate with incorrect information while cleaning out her late mother’s house.
She started a group to search for her own family, but the group ended up exposing a child-trafficking scandal that affects tens of thousands of people and spans decades.
