Cristina Prisco (center) with her biological mother (left) and her adoptive mom, Ann Marie Zagaglia, in Chile in July.
Ann Marie Zagaglia recalls noticing a certain sadness in the daughter that she and her husband adopted from Chile in 1980 and raised as an only child in their Italian-American family in the Bronx.
“I used to tell Cristina when she reached a certain age, ‘You have a void in you. And nothing can fill it, no matter what we try to do.'” Zagaglia, 73, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “At the time, I couldn’t understand it.”
Earlier this year, Zagaglia and her daughter, Cristina Prisco, 42, were shocked to learn the answer to the mystery: Prisco, it turned out, had been one of thousands of babies stolen from their parents in Chile in the 1970s and ’80s under the brutal regime of General Augusto Pinochet, who presented the scheme as a means of reducing poverty.
For more stories on remarkable adoptees who were stolen at birth in Chile, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribehere.
Cristina cried the entire long flight back home with her adoptive father. “When I unwrapped her at home, I was shocked,” Zagaglia says. “The formula they’d given her was nothing more than sugar water and the skin on her back was onion thin and purple.” At three and a half months, Cristina weighed only eight lbs.: “Our doctor told us that one more week and she would’ve died of dehydration.”
Cristina Prisco in 1980, after her adoption from Chile.
Alone and upset and unsure what to do, her mother was physically thrown out of the hospital. “She wanted to search for me, but she had three young children at home and no money and no one to help,” Prisco says. “She said she thought of me every day. I have two children and I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like — the pain she felt, not knowing where her child was and if she was okay. As we listened, me and my adopted mom were sitting in shock.”
Around Mother’s Day, one of Graf’s Chilean friends brought a MyHeritage DNA test to her birth mother in Chile (Prisco had already uploaded her DNA into the company’s family history system) and the results confirmed what she already felt to be true. She and Zagaglia made plans to visit Chile in July.
When they arrived at the airport in Chile, “I was nervous because I didn’t know where I would stand,” Zagaglia says. “Am I the person who took this child away all these years? I didn’t know if they would resent that I had her for 42 years, or if it would be okay.”
The entire family welcomed both women with open arms. “Cristina’s brother had made a beautiful sign reading ‘Welcome home, sister.’ And she took off running,” Zagaglia says. “Everybody hugged me too. To me, that was another miracle, that I became part of their family from the minute they saw me.”
That moment “felt like I was born again. It was the greatest day,” says Prisco, who now volunteers with Connecting Roots, helping other families reunite. Says Zagaglia, “I told her, ‘This is what the void was. You are whole now. That emptiness is finally filled.”
source: people.com
