The war orphans reunited 80 years on from the Holocaust

Until recently, Bill and Jacques didn't know if the other is still alive, but here they are reunited after 80 years - as Amy Lewis witnessed in Belgium

Jacques Weisser was only six months old when, in 1942, he was stolen from his family by the Nazis and sent to an orphanage for Jewish children.

There he met Bill Frankenstein, who lost his entire family during the Second World War.

Side by side, they spent the next three years together until Belgium was liberated, only to be separated and end up living thousands of miles apart. They have never seen each other since.

Almost 80 years on, Jacques has travelled from his home in Radlett, Hertfordshire, back to Brussels.

It is the first time he has returned to the Baron de Castro orphanage, and the first time he has seen Bill in eight decades.

Bill has travelled from his home in Los Angeles for their remarkable reunion.

Until recently they didn’t even know if the other is still alive. A researcher and the owner of the house discovered old records and photos and reconnected them.

On finally meeting each other, Jacques described the meeting as, “priceless”, adding “there are no words.”

'Young Bill... what can I say?': The emotional moment Bill and Jacques are reunited after 80 years

Bill told ITV News: “Now we know everything, through all the research that was done, we’ve come full circle and there’s no missing pieces now. We’re like two peas in a pod.”

The last time they were in the orphanage, which is now a private home, was 1945. They were three years old.

Bill told ITV News how, despite being in a Gestapo-controlled orphanage, the children lived in fear of raids by the Nazis: “I remember when the Nazi’s would come, we were hidden, I would remember being in a closet or a cupboard or whatever it was, clutching onto a toy truck for dear life and they’d say I’m going to put you up there, don’t say a word, don’t move at all.

"I remember that very distinctly.”

'I remember.... clutching onto a toy truck for dear life'

The boys were moved from the orphanage in 1944 just before a Nazi raid was due to take place and hidden by the resistance. Eventually they returned to the orphanage, but the children only survived thanks to strangers they cannot remember and therefore cannot thank.

Jacques told ITV News: “That, as far as I am concerned, and Bill will probably feel the same, that is the thing that we would have liked to do the most, is to honour and thank those who enabled us to be here today.

"Those who risked their lives for us.”

Six million Jewish people died during the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust.

On arrival at Auschwitz, Jacques lost his mother Martha, who was just 22. In total he lost 11 members of his family, including his sister Lea.

He was reunited after the war with his father Jacob who survived the concentration camps and a 400-mile death march.

Bill lost his father Abraham and his mother Hena. After being adopted by an American couple, he joined the US military.

If they were just a few years older, they wouldn’t have survived the war. Bill told ITV News: “They had a rule, if you were older than five years of age, that was it, you were arrested and deported.”

They were born within six weeks of each other but the similarities do not end there.

They both have one daughter and two grandsons, and despite their traumatic early childhoods they both went on to have successful careers, and as chance would have it, arrived wearing almost identical outfits.

Their childhoods were stolen, they lost most, or all, of their families, but 80 years on, they finally have someone who knows exactly how that feels.