Sophie’s father — a Warsaw obstetrician, born in Poland in 1878 — lived through more of the twentieth century than any one man should have had to. He had been a medical officer in the Russo-Japanese War in 1901 and a lieutenant colonel in WWI; in his off hours he was a sufficiently accomplished chess player to have beaten the Polish master Dawid Przepiórka three times out of four. He had also, before the German invasion of Poland, insisted that his daughter Sophie leave the country early — a piece of fatherly judgment that almost certainly saved her life.
He stayed. When the Germans took Warsaw he was sent to Majdanek, the concentration camp outside Lublin, for trying to help Jewish patients. He died there of typhoid fever. Sophie’s own 1960 hand-written autobiography describes him in detail but, like everyone on the Polish side of her family, never names him aloud — the name Josef Jakowski survives in this record only because the 1970 FBI background-check file recovered it.