Shortly after my hunt through Paris for Izzy, I was able to locate Irene’s mother, Sylvie Lanik, in Bordeaux. When we met, however, she refused to tell me anything about her daughter except to say that she was alive and well, and living in Switzerland. Irene bore some responsibility for her stepfather’s death, of course, and though more than a decade had passed since his murder, Mrs Lanik may have still feared her daughter’s arrest.
In August 1953, after my travels around France, I caught a boat to Cyprus and went on to Izmir by freighter. By then, I had learned that Erik’s wife Hannah had had Sephardic cousins named Zarco. I questioned three members of the family about Erik’s daughter Liesel, and I talked to about a dozen other Izmir Jews, but no one admitted knowing her. On one occasion, while speaking with her second cousin Abraham Zarco, I had the feeling that his denial wasn’t entirely genuine, but all my attempts to win his confidence proved useless. Maybe Liesel didn’t wish to be found. Or perhaps the family wanted nothing to do with her because of her relationship with Petrina.
My most recent find is Jaśmin Makinska. Only three months ago, I learned that she was living in England, where she had emigrated shortly after the war. To my great joy, I received a reply to my letter to her about a month ago. She told me that she was living near Weymouth, in a two-room cottage by the sea.
Jaśmin confirmed that she drove Erik and Izzy to Liza’s farm in March 1941, and that her sister was murdered by the SS when Erik was captured on 7 July.
Izzy fled on foot late that same afternoon, she told me. He managed to telephone her from a nearby town and give her the terrible news about Liza.
Jaśmin received one letter from Izzy, mailed three months later from Istanbul. He had made it there by freighter from Odessa, just as he and Erik had planned, and he would soon be on his way to Marseille. He was in excellent spirits and had already received a friendly letter from his old friend Louis, though he was full of remorse over Liza’s death and without much hope for Erik.
‘Izzy told me that he would write again when he was settled in the south of France, but I never received another word from him. The war had spread by then, and I suspect that his letters simply never made it to Warsaw. After I moved to England, he had no way of finding me – and there was no way I could locate him either.’
