In January 2022, a 44-year-old man in Moscow named Maxim Shimnyuk filed a claim. He said he was Roman Blum's great-grandson.
His story went back further than Helen. Before the war, he said, Blum had married a woman named Ester Lajzerevna in Poland, and in 1937 they had a daughter, Hannah.
Years earlier, some reports had said Blum lost a wife and children in the Holocaust. If Shimnyuk was right, part of that family had survived.
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The two stories sit uneasily side by side. One says Blum had a baby daughter in 1937. The other says that a year later, he was in love with Helen in Warsaw.
It would be up to the court to decide what was true. One claim rested on a love letter. The other rested on a family tree.