Alina Jeannopoulos — wife of Takis (Panagiotis) Jeannopoulos — was born 24 July 1919 in Łuck (Luck), Poland, a town in eastern Volhynia, then in interwar Poland, now Lutsk in Ukraine. She arrived in New York on 14 March 1946 aboard the USAT George W. Goethals sailing from Le Havre, France.
Her route — Łuck → Le Havre → New York — sketches the kind of life a Polish-born woman of her generation lived through and survived. Łuck was occupied by the Soviets (1939–41), then the Germans (1941–44), then the Soviets again. Many ethnic Poles fled west during or after the war. By March 1946 she had reached France, where the USAT George W. Goethals — a US Army Transport vessel running scheduled postwar passages between Le Havre and New York — was carrying war brides, displaced persons, and returning American servicemen across the Atlantic. She was on one of those crossings, reuniting with the husband who had been waiting for her in New York.
How they likely met
Takis was at the University of Paris medical school from 1931 through at least November 1937 (when his Doctorat Universitaire was certified). Alina, born in 1919, would have been a young woman in interwar Europe through those same years. The most natural reading of the dates is that they met somewhere in 1930s Europe — most likely in Paris — and married before or during WWII. He returned to the US (his 1940 draft registration places him in NYC). She was stuck in occupied Poland-then-France through the war years, until the 1946 USAT George W. Goethals sailing finally brought her across.
Discovering that Takis married — and married a Polish-born refugee with a war-survival arc as fraught as Sophie Jakowska’s on his brother Constantine’s side — recasts his place in the family record. They had no children, so their line ended with the two of them. What happened to Alina in New York after 1946 — her US life, her work, her later years, her date and place of death — is now the live thread.
She is almost certainly deceased by 2026 — born 1919, she would be 107.