Erika Makino in the Arcata Community Forest, Arcata, California, March 2020

In March 2020 I helped my mother Erika, then 91, to write the story of her amazing life.

— Annette Makino

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Erika Makino was born on July 24, 1928 in Basel, Switzerland to Margrit (Stehle) and Emil Koenig, a newspaper editor. She was the youngest child of three.

She was an adventurous person, fascinated by other cultures, languages, and perspectives. A quiet woman with a strong spirit, she always followed her calling and her own path.

The Koenigs lived in the countryside close to the city of Basel. Cows were pastured next door to the family home. Although her parents shopped and worked in town, Erika didn’t experience the city until she was five years old.

She spent much time playing outside, weather permitting. She has said that the cherry tree in the back yard was like a friend and recognized her. She loved to play in the sandbox with her brother Walter and sister Rita, building mountains, tunnels and roads.

Her first memory was of lying in her crib in the garden. Her unfamiliar great-aunts wanted to pick her up, but Rita protected her. When their mother returned from the house, both girls were crying.

Erika had a desire to travel from an early age. She had a picture book showing two Chinese people sitting on the ground, eating what looked like pink worms with sticks. It depicted other countries as strange and uncouth, but when Erika saw those pictures, she knew she wanted to travel to such strange places.

In 1939 when she was 11, World War II broke out in Europe. Since Basel is right on the border with Germany and France, everyone was afraid that Hitler would invade at any moment. It was a very unsettling time. From Basel one could see tracer fire between Germany and France.

In all the darkness of those years, Erika had a happy moment. Her mother bought backpacks for everyone in the family in case they had to flee into the Alpine region. While the rest of the family was deeply worried, it seemed to Erika that adventurous and exciting times were ahead.

Years later when the Americans joined the war effort, a sigh of relief went through Western Europe. Everyone thought the war would be over in two weeks, but it took two more years.

At night Erika woke to the drone of allied bombers flying overhead and dropping their loads over Germany. A few hours later, they returned; a vision of bombed houses, fire and screaming people haunted Erika.

Finally there was peace, but food and clothes were still rationed for some time. Gasoline was scarce also, but few people had cars then. Doctors and other people who needed to drive to make a living received a fair amount.

Erika remembers seeing a man carrying a box of eggs. Eggs were especially precious, and he must have saved his rations for a long time. He stumbled. In no time, a group of pedestrians stopped and observed the mess on the sidewalk with dismay and compassion.

Bread is a key component of most Swiss meals, so having very little bread was hard. Each member of Erika’s family had a small cloth bag holding their ration of bread for the day, which was weighed out on a scale.

Households were required to grow as many vegetables as possible, so Erika’s family planted potatoes in their lawn. All the parks were planted with food too.

Swiss teens had to help the war effort. The summer she turned 13, Erika was sent to work at a farm near Basel, where she helped the farmer’s wife in the fields and kitchen while the men were away protecting the border.

She enjoyed the field work like building “teepees” with four sheaves of grain pushed together. She remembered how wonderful it was hiding inside those little huts when she was a child.

There were very few machines at that time, and the groaning, swaying wagons loaded house-high with sheaves of grain were pulled by horses. Erika remembers the huge butts of those animals; sometimes the farmers stepped on them with their boots.

She attended the Basel Mädchen Gymnasium for high school, where she developed an interest in foreign languages. As was typical for college-bound Swiss students, the study of foreign languages was required. She studied French for eight years, English for five years, and Italian (as an optional subject) for three years. She taught herself Spanish and later also Japanese from language records.

She attended the University of Basel, majoring in German literature with a minor in history. She focused on Europe in the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance (15th century). “It was a bridge to a new age like we are living in now,” she said.

She spent a year studying and polishing her French in Paris, reachable by a four- or five-hour train ride from Basel. She rented an apartment on an upper floor of a building in the Place Pigalle, which she only later realized was a bordello. It was so inexpensive to live in France after the war that she paid a month’s rent with a cheap Swiss watch.

Career options for women were limited at that time: being a teacher was one of the few acceptable paths. Not wanting to teach a large classroom of unruly children, Erika decided to go into special education. She earned a certificate in the field from the “Heilpädagogisches Seminar” with some classes taught at the University of Zürich. After college, she began working with intellectually disabled children.

Erika’s passport photo for her trip to Peru, circa 1957

At 29, when she had saved enough money, she decided she wanted to emigrate to the United States. “It was the land of the future,” she said. “Everything exciting came from America. Everything was so new, not so stale. It was fresh air. Through a chain of lucky circumstances, I was able to go there.”

Erika was following in the footsteps of her grandfather who lived in the US for several years around 1880 and whose journal she had read with interest. It sounded quaint to her but alluring.

Her brother Walter had written a dissertation on the US Constitution, which led to him getting a scholarship to Yale Law School. He then worked in a legal office in New York. His boss strongly supported immigration, and agreed to sponsor Erika by depositing $20,000 in a bank, even though he had never met her.

Erika learned there was a two-year wait for her to obtain a visa to the US. Rather than wait in Switzerland, she decided to spend the time in Peru, where many Swiss people lived. She wrote to the Swiss Embassy in Lima and they offered to help her find work.

She took a boat down the Rhine to Holland and from there a freighter to Callao, the port for Peru. In Lima she worked first as an au pair to a family of German-Austrians. They were Jews who had fled Europe shortly before World War ll. They hired Erika because she could speak German with their children.

Later she worked in the Swiss Embassy in Lima doing translation, especially Italian into German, and office work.

She traveled extensively around Peru before there was much tourism, including to Machu Pichu and Cuzco, the old capital. She remembers lines of Peruvian women in brightly colored skirts and small bowler hats, spinning wool on a spindle while walking.

When her US visa finally came through, Erika was just about to get a good job as the director of a school. Oh well!

Instead of simply flying to the US, she decided to make the trip to the North overland through South and Central America by bus, small plane and riverboat. She took her time, spending several days in some towns, especially in Guatemala. The journey took three months.

When she finally arrived at the US border in Nogales, Arizona and saw the US flag, it was exciting. She knew she was about to begin a new life.

However, there was a delay: “No immigrants after 5 p.m.” She was disappointed and went back to a hotel, wearily lugging her suitcase.

The next morning, a customs employee took Erika to a private room, where she had to undress to show that she wasn’t taking anything illegal across the border. Erika thought it was strange. It seemed the lady was interested in her wardrobe, her nude body or perhaps she wanted to humiliate her.

The fast and clean American buses, the plump, straight walls of the houses, the orderly streets and sidewalks were astonishing.

Erika decided to move to San Francisco, where she first stayed at the YMCA. It was a shock to be in the US. People didn’t smile at strangers. They seemed cold and reserved compared to the friendly people of South and Central America.

She rented an apartment and began looking for work. It was difficult. On the day she had just one dollar left in her purse, she was offered a job at the Lucinda Weeks School for intellectually disabled children. Erika was surprised that the director didn’t want to see her diplomas, certificates or letters of reference; this trusting, intuitive approach struck her as uniquely American.

After two years in the US, she was accepted as a resident. After five years she was able to apply for a citizenship. The prospective citizens had to take an examination. She realized that she was supposed to know the numbers of the amendments. She passed with flying colors anyhow.

Erika frequently visited the foreign student center of the University of Southern California. There she met a German student, Bob Goss, who introduced her to his wife Edith. The two women became friends for life.

Bob informed her that colleges were looking for teaching assistants to instruct German, but they had to be graduate students. So Erika applied to UCLA. When the admissions office studied her certificates, they advised her to go straight on to earn a Ph.D. Erika declined and limited herself to a smaller load, going for a master’s degree in German Studies.

In her mid-thirties, she decided she wanted a child and figured that she could always get married later. She had a romance with a foreign grad student and in 1963 her daughter Annette was born. “Holding this baby in my arms was the happiest day of my life,” she said.

Erika and Annette lived in graduate student housing at UCLA while Erika finished her degree. An Indian woman, Mohini Pai, had a child of the same age and the two mothers arranged babysitting together.

Erika and Annette often went on Sierra Club hikes around the Los Angeles area, mother carrying Annette in a baby backpack.

Erika learned to drive in Los Angeles, with a baby in the back seat and a car that would stall in the middle of intersections. She often had to call a tow truck.

One of the most frightening events of her life was when she entered a freeway for the first time. In the rear view mirror she saw Annette standing up, having freed herself from the straps of the baby seat. As soon as she was able, Erika stopped, parked and adjusted the straps, her heart still beating in fear.

Erika and Motoji Makino on their wedding day, 1965

In 1965 Erika married Motoji Makino, a Japanese doctoral student in nuclear physics at the University of Southern California. They had met at a party for foreign students a few years earlier and gotten to know each other because Erika was interested in learning Japanese.

There was a broken table lamp in her apartment. Erika’s previous suitors had noticed it was broken and quit using it; Motoji immediately ran downstairs to his car, got out his tools, returned and fixed the lamp. “I thought, I’m in good hands with a guy like that,” she said.

The young family moved to Santa Monica. Soon there were two more daughters, Yoshi in 1966 and Yuri in 1967.

Erika with her daughters Annette, Yuri (in Erika’s arms) and Yoshi, Santa Monica, circa 1968

In 1971, when their house on Idaho Avenue was about to be demolished and Motoji was on an assignment on the East Coast, Erika and the girls moved to Takasaki, Japan for five months.

At first they lived with Motoji’s parents in a traditional Japanese home. It was a difficult dynamic for Erika: the in-laws didn’t want a babysitter for the children—a stranger in their house—but also didn’t want to babysit. Things went better when Erika and the children moved to a small house next door and had more independence. Motoji joined them a few months later.

On their return to the States after five months, the family lived in Santa Barbara in an elegant home with ocean view owned by one of Motoji’s professors. Later they moved to the nearby suburb of Goleta.

The women’s movement was exciting and new at the time. Erika got involved with the Santa Barbara chapter of the National Organization for Women.

She pursued various creative interests including making puppets, building a small dome out of wooden dowels, and creative writing.

Meanwhile, the marriage did not survive. Erika and Motoji divorced in 1973. Years later, Erika regretted the break she had initiated. “The trouble was that we—I—didn’t communicate,” she said. “The divorce was the worst mistake I made in my life.”

After Erika’s father died in 1976, she and her three daughters moved to Switzerland for a year to spend time with Erika’s newly widowed mother in Basel. Erika worked at an institute for epileptic children in Zürich and commuted back to Basel every weekend by train.

Later Erika and her children moved into a small commune in the village of Russikon in the Zürich area, not far from her job. “I found it interesting to get to know all different types of people,” she said.

Erika had always had a dream of living in the country. On their return to the US, Erika started looking for a piece of land to buy with a small inheritance from her father. Meanwhile, as she was not working, her savings dwindled. It was such a stressful time, she threw up almost every day.

After many months of searching, she bought three acres in rural Redwood Valley, near Ukiah in Mendocino County, Northern California. The girls were so tired of the endless search, they didn’t even want to come out of the family’s red VW bus to see the land.

To save money while a small prefab A-frame house was constructed, the family lived first at a campground and then at the home for intellectually disabled men where Erika had started work teaching them life skills.

Although Erika’s position was state-funded, the home was run by a group she had never heard of called People’s Temple. While living there, Erika and her girls were shocked and horrified by the mass murder-suicide at Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978. Staff members at the home lost their children and other loved ones.

Erika’s home in Redwood Valley, California from 1979 to the end of her life.

But the spring of 1979 was also a happy and exciting time. Erika and her daughters moved into their new house on a hillside covered with manzanita, madrone and oak trees. This remained Erika’s home for the rest of her life.

Erika always felt comfortable with people from “different realities.” In her special education career, she mainly worked with the intellectually disabled. At one of her other jobs, she counseled people who were recently discharged from mental institutions. Her gift for perceiving other realities and energies allowed her to see through the labels to understand and appreciate these special individuals.

She pursued a variety of creative interests, including writing semi-autobiographical short stories. These often focused on the subtleties of relationships and inner landscapes. In 1993 she self-published a collection of her work called Six of Cups: A Circle of Stories.

Besides frequent trips to Switzerland and other parts of Europe, Erika loved visiting new places. In her 60s she traveled solo through North Africa by bus, making friends and receiving several marriage proposals along the way.

Erika with young friends in Algeria, 1988

From Tamanrasset at the end of the bus line in the south of Algeria, she proceeded via a truck loaded high with dates. As the only paying passenger, she was allowed to sit next to the driver. A couple of locals travelled on top of the dates.

The crossing from one civilization to the other was astonishing. In contrast to the somber veiled females in the south of Algeria, suddenly there were women wearing colorful dresses.

The trip offered her a grim picture of the effect of climate change on land and people. A local man in Timbuktu, Mali, showed her around. With a sweeping motion of his arms he said, “In a generation or two all this will be covered with sand.” There was sadness and resignation in his voice.

Erika heard of a work camp in Ghana for foreign students who were building a schoolhouse. Participants had to pay a fee. There was plenty of work but the tools were scarce and a soon as one person put down their shovel, three other students jumped up to grab it.

“We slept in dorms and I remember the mouse that ran over my face and woke me up,” she said. A few weeks later, she got a job teaching French at the International School in Accra, Ghana.

A few years later, Erika spent some months living and writing in Antigua, Guatemala. She had a task there. A young Swiss from a family she had befriended had died in that area years earlier. She found his grave, had flowers planted and the inscription on the stone repainted. She felt compassion for the young tourist who died alone in a foreign country.

Not long before Erika’s granddaughter Maya was born in 1997, she moved to Arcata, California to help out. While living in Arcata, she was active with the Arcata Zen Group. She made close friends while living on their property and hosting events.

When her grandson Gabriel was born in 2001, she moved in with Annette’s family to help care for the children, living with them for six years.

Erika with her pack llamas, Shandy (left) and Dancer (right), at Mad River Beach, Arcata, California, 2003

In Arcata Erika had two llamas whom she trained to carry packs so she could still go on overnight hiking trips. Over seven years, they became good companions.

At age 80 she took a few weeks to walk the Way of St. James by herself. This is a medieval pilgrimage route in Northwestern Spain that had always fascinated her. “Sometimes in between hostels, I was all by myself, and I felt the power of the landscape and of the trail that had carried countless pilgrims over centuries,” she said. “It was impossible not to be awed.”

From Spain she flew to Thailand for a couple of months of travel, and then on to Japan, a place she loved.

Erika with a semi-abstract cement sculpture of a dinosaur, 2003

Erika developed a passion for making semi-abstract sculptures, mostly of people and animals, working in clay, cement and adobe. “I had always admired sculptors, but thought it was only for people who had talent—not me,” she said.

She had once taken a ceramics class at the Mendocino Art Center. “I found this activity wonderful, I would like to do this for the rest of my life, but then I didn’t do it for about 30 years, and only when I was 80 I started doing it every day.” She had several exhibits of her work in Ukiah, California, the most recent at age 88.

On Erika’s first day at the University of Basel, a young man started chatting with her in the lobby. This was the beginning of a 70-year friendship with Arthur Rath.

He was a German Jew who had managed to escape from the Nazis but sadly lost many of his family members in the holocaust. Arthur had fled from Germany to Holland, to the north of France, to the south of France, always running from the invading German army. When he arrived in Switzerland he finally felt safe.

At age 90 Erika received an unexpected inheritance from Arthur. With the money he left her, Erika had a small yurt built on her land to serve as an art studio for making clay sculpture, realizing a longtime dream.

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The Makino-Blank family in December 2025 in Arcata, California. Back row, left to right: Gabriel, Paul, Annette, Maya. Front row: Enakai, Yuri, Erika, Yoshi

Erika died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Redwood Valley, California on February 7, 2025. The cause was respiratory failure after a bout of pneumonia. She was surrounded in her last days and moments by her daughters Annette, Yoshi and Yuri. She was 96.

Having lived a long and rich life, Erika once said that she was not afraid to die. She felt that death would be “like taking off a heavy backpack—and then you’re free.”

Erika is survived by her daughters Annette Makino (Paul W. Blank), Yoshi Makino, and Yuri Makino, her grandchildren Maya Makino, Gabriel Blank, and Enakai Makino, and her niece Karin Franz.

Erika Beatrice Makino
July 24, 1928 - February 7, 2025