probably living in some other Paris suburb or elsewhere in France. I wished I had asked him to give me Louis’ full name – and made him swear to me that it wasn’t an anagram.
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 Jasmin 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.
Jasmin 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.
Jasmin 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.’
I expect that Izzy, his sons and Louis may be living in or around Marseille. I shall do my best to find them.
Jasmin promises not to give up searching for him, as well, though she also says that she’ll never set foot in Continental Europe again.
* On the way home from Izmir, I stopped in Lublin and said a kaddish for Erik outside the Lipowa Street camp. And for all the other heroic friends of ours who were long gone, especially Johann, who had given up his life for me.
Seeing the muddy clearing where Erik had been hanged and hearing my trembling voice undid me, however. I felt as if I were pulling my existence out of an emptiness so great that everything I saw and felt was only an illusion.
I stayed just long enough to intone an ‘El Male Rachamim’ for Erik’s soul and then fled, though turning away from where he’d been murdered made me feel as though I was leaving behind the best part of myself.
I think of Erik every day of my life. I try to remember the dead in all their uniqueness, as he would have wanted.
The autobiography of the Jews is still being written. That is our victory. And I believe now that Erik’s deepest hope was for The Warsaw Anagrams to serve as his contribution to it. I am convinced, in fact, that that was why he returned as an ibbur.
Heniek Corben
Warsaw, 3 Kislev, 5715 (28 November 1954)
(all words are in Yiddish except where otherwise indicated) Alter kacker – Literally, ‘old shitter’, but with the meaning of ‘old fart’.
Brenen zol er! – ‘May he burn in hell’; a common curse.
Challah – A yeast-leavened egg bread, usually braided, traditionally eaten on the Sabbath.
Der shoyte ben pikholtz – ‘The idiot son of a woodpecker’; a traditional epithet.
Dreidl – a four-sided top inscribed with the Hebrew letters and, which together form the acronym for (a great miracle happened there).
Ech – A groan or exclamation of displeasure or disparagement.
‘El Male Rachamim’ – Hebrew prayer for the repose of the soul of the departed.
Festina lente – Latin for ‘hurry slowly’.
Flor – German word for the gauze or crepe used in women’s clothing and in veils.
Gehenna – Hebrew word for hell, used commonly in Jewish folktales and kabbalistic literature.
– Polish for stuffed cabbage leaves; part of the country’s traditional cuisine.
Golem – Hebrew: In Jewish folklore and mystical traditions, a golem is an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter. The most famous story of such a creature involves Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, who was said to have created a golem to defend the Jewish ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks.
Gottenyu – My God!
Goy – Non-Jewish person, gentile.
Goyim – The plural of Goy.
Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik! – Literally, ‘Don’t knock me a teakettle,’ but with the meaning, ‘Stop rattling on and on with that endless chatter!’
Hanschen klein – Little Hans in German.
Hatikvah – An anthem written by Naphtali Herz Imber, a Galician Jew, who moved to Palestine in the 1880s. The Hebrew title means ‘The Hope’.
Hilfe – ‘Help’ in German.
Ibbur – Hebrew word for ghost, spirit or spectre.
Kaddish – The Jewish prayer of mourning.
Katshkele – Little duck.
Levone – Moon.
