This photograph shows my parents' wedding. I don't know anything about how my parents met; in this case I can only imagine how things happened. I think that they likely met at some spa at the end of the 1920s. I've seen photographs of my father in various spa towns from that period, so it's possible that he and my mother met someplace while on vacation. During my childhood I never discussed it with my parents, after the war I no longer had the possibility of asking anyone. That's why I don't even know when and where they had their wedding. It likely must have been in the year 1930, likely in Nachod, my mother's home town.
My father was a sales agent for the Kudrnac company, which manufactured various rubber products, and had its head office in Nachod. My father traveled by train around Slovakia, where he had his circuit and his clients, he visited individual shoemakers or small shops and sold them rubber heels and soles. He'd be away the whole week, he actually only returned on Sunday or Saturday and then left again. My father had the 'traveling salesman's disease': he was a gambler. Most traveling salesmen played cards, because when they arrived in a strange town, where they had no family, the only thing that was left to do was to get together and play cards. I remember that as soon as my father came home from his travels, the whole gang would get together in a pub or café, and play the card game Marias. He had this notebook, in which he would record how much he had won and how much he had lost. I think that in this respect my mother had a lot of problems with him. He was likely quite well-known as a card player in Pardubice, because people used to call my sister and me 'the soroklings' - from the Russian word sorok, which means forty - which is a term used in Marias.
