Milena Prochazkova with her father Ervin Kosiner

This picture is from the year 1936 or 1937, that's me with my father Ervin Kosiner. They took our picture at a studio in Prague. My father was a big joker, he loved humor. He worked very hard all his life, today they call it being a workaholic. That's exactly him. I would never see him until the evening. He was born on 16th June 1900 in Bukoly, near Kralupy, and then attended Czech Technical University in Prague. He studied civil engineering and worked all his life as a structural engineer - he designed large chemical plants. That's why during the war he was transferred to the Wulkow concentration camp as chief engineer. During World War I my father was in the army as a gunner. From 1917 to 1918, so he was 17 when he joined up. I don't know what front he was at. The only thing he talked about was how horribly he hated it. His butt was constantly sore, because the gunners pulled cannons around with horses, so he was permanently on a horse. But he didn't recall it in a particularly negative fashion, we're a family that doesn't return to what's past. He would usually tell funny stories - which runs in the family - about the food, what they cooked for them there, and about the horses and how he couldn't stand it and how he was horribly afraid of horses. But where exactly he was, he perhaps didn't even talk about that. It, of course, wasn't his wish to be in the artillery, they stuck him there, due to the horses he probably wouldn't have picked it voluntarily. I didn't have any siblings. Though in 1934, when I was four, my parents had a baby boy, Jan, but he had a serious congenital chest defect and died while still a baby. He lived to the age of five months. It was evidently some sort of genetic defect. I've most likely also got it, a congenital heart defect, but in my case it's somehow been overcome. It's possible that I've got it from my father, even though a heart attack doesn't have anything to do with a congenital defect.