She didn’t find her father, an American soldier, until she was 70.
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Alma Mestlová was born in Plzeň on 22 February 1946 as the daughter of single mother Anna Krtová and father Ernest Plouff, an American soldier who liberated Plzeň. Her mother wrote to Ernest Plouff at his address in Ludington, USA, but his mother replied he was missing. When he came back home later due to an injury, his mother did not tell him that he had a daughter in Czechoslovakia. Anna Krtová married Josef Fiala and kept the father’s real identity secret from her daughter. She found out by accident at age ten from a lady in the queue outside a butcher’s shop. She spent part of her childhood with her grandparents as her stepfather Josef Fiala and her mother had to leave Plzeň for the borderland over their protest against the currency reform. She started working in kindergarten in 1964, and became the kindergarten headmaster in Jivjany near Domažlice at age 19. This is where she met her husband, zootechnician Václav Mestl. They raised two adopted daughters together but stopped seeing them both when they grew up. She accidentally learned that her American father was alive while on vacation in Greece from a man whose hobby was compiling family trees. When she was 70 years old, she met her father for the first and final time in Alabama; Ernest Plouff was almost 94 years old.
