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.