Arnošt Obst

“Then there was the war, there was nothing else to do and my dad had to go to the war. And when I was born in 1944, in autumn of that year he actually saw me for the first and last time. What happened was that he had to go to the Russian front with the wehrmacht and allegedly he got within a distance of seven kilometers from Moscow. He was captured and he only contacted us in 1950 or 1951 from Germany after they released him; he had been somewhere in the Caucasus. His profession was a shoemaker, and the first thing that interested him in his first letter was where his tools were. Not how I was doing, but he was asking about his tools. And he wanted my mom to go to him to Germany. Well, my mom simply said that she had been searching for him since the end of the war, through the International Red Cross, and she wrote to Switzerland, and to the US Army command and the German army command, and so on, and there was no sign of him, until he contacted her himself. Well, my mom did not go there, nor did he come here. He was afraid of the communists. Well, they eventually divorced.”

“That was also the reason why dad told me back then in 1968 that if I wanted to, I could come to Germany and that he would help me. We already had little Renatka, and my wife was expecting, our daughter Lenka was to be born, and she said that she would not leave the country, because her mom was here and that we would stay here. Well, otherwise we would have probably left. I don’t regret that we didn’t go to Germany, even though there were times when it was not easy for us.”