War and the Ordinary Man

This book is a co-production of my father's memoirs, which I translated, covering his life from before World War I through World War II and after, as well as of my own early childhood experiences during and after World War II. The book starts in our homeland in the Czech Republic and ends about 1952 in West Germany. My father had to leave a rather comfortable life and join the German Army in 1939. He recounts his years with the military in great detail. Good luck and survival skills helped him during the war and as a POW. He was able to live through hopeless situations and sometimes turned them into heartwarming events.

At the beginning of his career, my father was a supervisor in yarn manufacturing. My parents married in 1935. My mother was a milliner with her own shop. They received land from my father’s mother. He built a house there in 1937. After World War II, he never saw his homeland again. He worked for another 20 years in yarn manufacturing in West Germany and died in 1991. I was born in Czechoslovakia in 1939, expelled to West Germany in 1946. I was trained as a technical translator in West Germany and worked there for 12 years. In 1967 I moved to the United States and got married in San Francisco. I have one son. After receiving a degree in business, I worked as a credit manager. I retired in 2002.