Ruth Goetzova with her mother, husband and a friend

This picture was taken in Podebrady at the beginning of the 1950s. From the left you can see my friend Eli Freundova, my mother, Hilda Lasova (nee Krauskopfova), me and my husband Jiri Setina. I've always loved children, as a girl I had wanted to become a children's doctor. When I returned from the prison camp, doctors told me that I shouldn't count on being able to get pregnant. I was very disappointed by this and so I was in no hurry to get married. Then I met one divorced man, who was taking care of a six-year-old girl named Miluska. So I said to myself, that if I couldn't have my own child, why couldn't I at least raise someone else's. I got married in 1955, and the following year I got pregnant and had a son, Rene. My husband at that time was born in 1918 in Prague, was a Czech and was named Jiri Setina. We met through our work. He worked for a company named Lab Instruments, where they had begun manufacturing a gas chromatograph. He and one of his colleagues learned to use it, and then when their company began to sell it, they would travel around to teach people how to use it. His business card said: 'Expert in gas chromatography.' So he traveled all over the world and was almost never at home. We divorced in 1972; he had found a younger woman of Russian origin. In 1968 Miluska immigrated to Vienna and then to America, where she lives to this day. I have two grandsons there. I've visited Miluska several times, but now she mostly comes here to visit me. We have a beautiful relationship. I went to visit her for the first time in the 1970s, but in those days it wasn't that simple. I remember that the police summoned my husband and questioned him as to why I wanted to go to America if I wasn't her mother.