The parents of Ephraim and Lena Saks made their way from Ponedel in Lithuania to Dublin in 1914 via Leeds and Antwerp. They had three young children when they arrived, and the family remained in Ireland for the duration of the First World War. 

Ephraim Saks was born in Dublin on 19th April 1915, and his sister, Lena (or Jeanne), on 2 February 1918. Sometime after the end of the First World War, the family returned to Antwerp and a Belgian record shows the family living there together with the five children. Ephraim Saks was a furrier and single and living in France at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was arrested and was deported from Drancy transit camp in Paris to Auschwitz on 24 August 1942, where he was murdered. 

Jeanne Saks was a salesperson and single. She was living in Antwerp during the war. She was captured and deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered in 1942/43. 

Testimony by Julia Apfel, a sister of Ephraim and Jeanne Saks, is on the Yad Vashem website. Three of Julia’s siblings, two of whom, Ephraim and Lena, were born in Dublin and hence were Irish citizens, were murdered in the Holocaust. Her brother, Jacob, who also perished, had been born in Leeds in 1906. Ephraim Saks is inscribed in the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris (Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation).