I walked up to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and told the jarhead at the entrance that I wanted to join them
Stáhnout obrázek
Petr Loubal was born on 5 December 1932 as Petr Schwarz, the only son of a Jewish marriage. His parents divorced before the beginning of the war. With the onset of Nazism and after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, his father Edmund Schwarz lost his law practice and offered his ex-wife Gertrude Weiss to get his son to safety. They lived in the French capital until the German occupation of Paris, then fled to the south of France and from there to England. The witness‘s father worked as a law expert in Beneš‘s government-in-exile. In England, the witness went to school with the so-called Winton children. After the war his father was employed by the Ministry of the Interior. Petr Loubal graduated from the Czech Technical University in Prague and in 1959, while on holiday in Egypt, he visited the American Embassy and applied for asylum. The Americans took him first to Germany, then allowed him to travel to the USA. He studied transportation engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked until his retirement. After the Velvet Revolution he supplied computers to Czechoslovakia. He was married three times and has 4 children. In 2023, he was living in his home in El Cerrito, California.
