This morning I was reminded of a real story, my mom told us..... In the Second World War, her dad used to have a radio shop on the ground floor where they lived and during the war, he secretly tuned friends' radios so they could hear the BBC broadcasts which the German Army had banned people from listening. One day someone snitched on him and the Germans came and took him away. Her brother was in his teens and a big boy so they also took him away at the same time. For months, the two were in a local prison, so she and her mom occasionally visited and saw them through the fences and exchanged some sweet words. Then one day, they disappeared, it was said that the men were taken to work in a factory making bullets and such for the Germans in some faraway place. The war was over and the Czech women waited, hoping for their loved ones to come back home, some did and some did not. My mom and her mom went without, survived the pain and life went on. They never came back. Ten years passed, and my mom and her mom lived on with life by themselves, then one night there was a hard knocking at the door, that woke them up, scared, my mom went to the door not knowing what would be upon them and the knocking continued, thump thump! She gently opened the door in the middle of the night, her heart beating and her mom standing behind holding a big stick, outside was a thin-looking bald man, toothless and weak, almost fainting, and he stood there looking at her and a word came out of his mouth, ...........Jirina? Jirina?.... Her name. She blinked in the faint light and looked at him again, Janofski? She recognized him through his eyes, her brother was back, standing there faint and weak, he had found his way back home, they wept, took him in, fed him soup and thanked the lord that he was alive and back home. The father never returned, Janofski lived till 85 and we heard of his passing about three years ago, he married, had a life, three children and four grandchildren. This is a real story from the second world war, that stayed in my head till...... I shared it with you, just now. Embrace your siblings, we don't know where life takes each one of us. Reflect and be grateful for what you have.
