At the Airport, the Harried, the Hectic . . . and the Very Happy

The airport isn't a very happy place right now -- grim-faced business travelers trudge in from another gloom-and-doom meeting, families fret over fares, airline workers seem jumpy and glum. So it shouldn't have been surprising that a crowd of total strangers gathered around Angie Scurlock at the Dulles international arrivals gate to watch as she nearly burst out of her skin to meet her half brother, Hans Engel.

At 49, Scurlock was laying eyes on one of her three siblings for the first time. Five months ago, Scurlock didn't know she had siblings.

Now, thanks to determined detective work by an American woman in Germany who devotes herself to reuniting adoptees with long-lost relatives, a black woman who was raised by the owners of a D.C. liquor store would find out just what she had in common with a German truck driver who grew up in an orphanage.

How would Scurlock even know which passenger was Hans, asked her friend from work at the U.S. Patent Office in Alexandria.

"I'll know," Scurlock said.

She did, instantly. So did everyone else in the hall. The color of their skin was different, but pretty much everything else about sister and brother seemed eerily familiar -- eyes, nose, shape of the face, build, and their instinct about what to do first. They hugged and they kissed. They caressed each other's cheeks and nestled against each other's shoulders.

On the basis of a visit from a stranger bearing adoption records, Engel, 59, and his son, Benjamin, had gotten on a plane, making Engel's first trip to the United States, to see a woman who was his first link to the mother he had never known.

The story begins, like so many of this sort, with war and love. Germany at the end of World War II was chockablock with American soldiers. Over the course of the decade after the war, Inge Engel, a German whose father had been killed in the war, had four children by four different men, two of them U.S. servicemen. Inge left one son to be taken into the German foster-care system at birth; another son was adopted by a German family. Her two daughters, both biracial, were adopted by black American military couples.

Inge eventually married another American soldier and moved to the United States. But aside from one quick visit when Angie was 3 years old, there was no contact between the mother and her children.

Angie didn't find out that she was adopted until she was 11. One day at home in Southeast Washington, as they watched "One Life to Live" on TV, a friend of Angie's adoptive mother asked the girl: "Do you know what 'adopted' means?"

In the vaguest terms, the friend told Angie that her parents weren't who she thought. But not a word about adoption ever passed between Angie and her parents. "I had a good life," Scurlock says. "I had a pony, I had a minibike. I didn't see the need to rock the boat."

Only decades later, after her adoptive parents had died, did she act on that shred of information.