After over two decades of separation Czech woman finds long-lost son in Canada via facebook

The social networking website facebook has both its fans and its critics, but there is no denying that it can bring people together. One person who could testify to that is Czech woman Ladislava Schröderová; through facebook she was able to re-establish contact after over two decades with a son who was living in Canada and believed she was no longer alive.

Ladislava Schröderová lost all contact with her son Jiří in the late 1980s. She had had the boy with a career soldier who travelled a lot. When their marriage broke up she says she was pressured into giving her ex-husband custody of the boy.

He took Jiří with him when he defected to Austria in 1988, a year before the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. From there father and son moved to Canada, where they settled down.

Ladislava Schröderová, who lives in Rumburk in north Bohemia, has told the Czech media that her ex-husband told her son Jiří a terrible lie: that she had been killed in a car accident.

And that is where the story might have ended. However, things took a remarkable turn last year after Schröderová got herself a computer and signed up to the social networking site facebook. A friend had told her about an American woman who had re-established contact with a long-lost child via the site.

The now middle-aged blonde entered her son’s age and name, using the English version of Jiří, George, and within minutes found the profile of a young man she felt sure was him. She sent him a message.

Photo: Kristýna Maková

As Schröderová tells it, her son at first refused to believe that she was his mother. But gradually George accepted her story and the two began conversing on-line via Skype. She says the one thing she is grateful to her ex-husband for is that he brought their child up to speak Czech and communication was not a problem.

George came to the Czech Republic for a tearful reunion with his mother. He then came a second time with his girlfriend, who accepted his proposal of marriage on Prague’s Petřín Hill, in Ladislava’s presence.