NEW YORK (AP) — For decades, Jackie Young had been searching.

Orphaned as an infant, he spent the first few years of his life in a Nazi internment camp in what is now the Czech Republic. After World War II he was taken to England, adopted and given a new name.

As an adult, he struggled to learn of his origins and his family. He had some scant information about his birth mother, who died in a concentration camp. But about his father? Nothing. Just a blank space on a birth certificate.

That changed earlier this year when genealogists were able to use a DNA sample to help find a name — and some relatives he never knew he had.

Having that answer to a lifelong question has been “amazing,” said Young, now 80 and living in London. It “opened the door that I thought would never get opened.”

A genealogy testing kit for Ancestry/DNA is displayed in the Ackman and Ziff Family Genealogy Institute research area at the Center for Jewish History (CJH), Tuesday Nov. 29, 2022, in New York. CJH is launching a project offering the DNA testing kits for free to Holocaust survivors and their children to help increase the possibly of finding family connections torn apart in World War II. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Bebeto Matthews

A genealogy testing kit for Ancestry/DNA is displayed in the Ackman and Ziff Family Genealogy Institute research area at the Center for Jewish History (CJH), Tuesday Nov. 29, 2022, in New York. CJH is launching a project offering…