When my wife and I visited Vera Motlikova in 2018, my wife asked her directly if she and Otto Kudibal ever had any children, and Vera told her no. That is why it came as such a surprise when, in January 2026, out of nowhere, I received a message on Facebook from a woman named Lenka Machackova, who lived in the Czech Republic. She wrote that she had found my story about Otto Kudibal on the internet and that she had a very personal reason for writing to me. She told me she was adopted right after she was born and that only recently did she find out who her biological parents really were: a woman named Vera Motlikova and Otto Kudibal.

Lenka was born September 4, 1963, and was given up for adoption when she was only 8 days old, taken by her adoptive parents to a small village in Moravia near the Slovak border. She grew up not knowing she was adopted until she was 20 years old, since her adoptive parents always showed her a birth certificate with their own names on it, and she had no reason to doubt them. It took her many years of searching, through records that Vera had deliberately falsified and through a genealogy website, before she finally traced her way to the Motlikova family and learned who her biological father was.

I was in the army in Tabor from September 1962 to August 1964, so I was away during Vera’s pregnancy, and Kudibal never said one word about it to me. Interestingly, in 1964, he and Vera came to visit me in Tabor, and at the time I thought it was only to talk about my own girlfriend’s pregnancy, never suspecting that the two of them had a story of their own they were keeping hidden. Vera hid her pregnancy from almost everyone, even most of her own family, spending nearly the last 3 month of it in the hospital under a false diagnosis so no one would suspect she was expecting a child.

Lenka and I have been writing back and forth since then, and she told me about her life, which had not been easy; she lost her husband when she was 35 years old and raised her 2 children by herself after that. She now has 4 grandchildren and, by all accounts, has done well for herself. She asked me if I could try to reach any of Kudibal’s grandchildren, and I did try, but the one person who answered me asked, politely but firmly, that I respect it was up to them whether they wanted contact, and that I should not push the matter further. I understood and did not try again.

I was very happy that something I wrote, meant only for my own children, found its way to someone I never knew existed, and gave her at least a small picture of the father she never had a chance to meet. It also made me think that Vera had spent much of her life trying to bury that part of her past, maybe even from herself. Either way, what I wrote earlier in this story, that Otto Kudibal and Vera had no children, turned out not to be true.