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I was born into a Jewish family in the middle of World War II in Almaty, Kazakhstan. My father Vítězslav Löbl, a native of Ostrava, had a German education as a child of Austria-Hungary. He trained as a tailor and went to Radom, Poland, to gain some experience. He was accommodated in the family of a Jewish butcher, Baruch Zylberberger, who had four daughters and two sons. And coincidentally, one of those daughters, Dora, father fell in love with. The war began and he and his new wife wondered where they would be safe as Jews. They chose to leave for Russia. In Almaty, my father repaired the uniforms of Russian soldiers, my mother probably helped him, took care of the household, and she gave birth to me in the spring of 1943. After the war, my parents returned with me through Poland. According to the story, we sailed on the Volga River and I, as a small three-year-old child, met Stalin in person. But neither in Radom nor in Krakow did the parents find any of my mother’s relatives. They concluded that the whole family had died during the war in a concentration camp. In the meantime, my brother Jindřich was born in Szczecin in 1946. My parents continued to Ostrava, where my father was seeking his relatives. Someone told him some Mr. Löbl was living in Krnov. We went there and actually found my father´s brother’s plumbing company. There were vacant houses in the border town of Krnov after the expulsion of the Germans. The authorities welcomed anyone who wanted to settle the area. The city gave us an apartment on the first floor of a small villa. In this house, I spent my early childhood, went to school and to the cinema, where I understood, as the only Russian speaker, Soviet movies in the original, and I also had fun with my friends. Compulsory school attendance ended in the eighth grade, then I moved to Otrokovice to study to become an electrician. I commuted home each week by a train pulled by the old steam locomotives, releasing soot into the open windows of the wagons. In Krnov, I didn’t even know about my Jewish origin. My parents, typically for their generation, did not talk about it, though Dad wore a headdress for festive lunches and dinners. There were several large companies in Krnov, one of them, Karnola, where fabrics were woven, became my workplace after vocational training. I started to work there as an electrician. After the war, I graduated from evening electrical engineering in Bruntál. A friend who stayed in Prague encouraged me to go to the capital, where there were more job opportunities for a person with a high school diploma. My journey through life led me from Moravia to Bohemia. I got a place and an apartment from a Prague building construction company.