Robitscher Family Collection

Thomas Otto Robitscher was born in Karlsbad, Czeckoslovakia, in 1924. His father, Pavel (Paul) Robitscher, was an engineer; his mother, Magdalena Robitscher-Hahn, a physician and dentist, having received degrees in both fields. When the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia in 1939, Thomas, aged 15, escaped with his mother to Bolivia, where he worked for various industrial companies. Thomas arrived in the U.S. on a student visa in 1947 to study at Syracuse University, then went on to study medicine at Boston University. He was awarded his MD in 1954 and worked at New York's Rosevelt Hospital. Unable to follow his profession without being a US citizen he worked in pharmacological research and also explored professional careers in Australia and England. His efforts to acquire U.S citizenship were troubled by suspicions about previous political affiliations with leftist groups in Bolivia and by the fact that his mother was a communist. He finally received U.S. citizenship in 1961. Thomas married his first wife, Carla Bloch, in 1957. They divorced in 1962. Anne Kelemen became his second wife through common-law marriage. Thomas Robitscher suffered from depression throughout much of his life and committed suicide in 1974.

Magdalena Robitscher-Hahn, Thomas’ mother, was born in 1899 in Karlsbad. She studied dentistry in Germany. In 1923, she married Paul Robitscher. During most of their marriage, she supported the family by running a spa hotel in Marienbad, since Paul suffered from tuberculosis and spent many years in sanatoria. After her husband's death in 1933, she moved to Prague and followed her dental profession. Upon the Nazi occupation, she left Prague and went with her son to Bolivia. At the end of World War II, she expected to be repatriated to Czechoslovakia, where she hoped to help rebuild her homeland. When she was refused Czech citizenship by the new government, she volunteered her services as a physician and dentist to UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She was initially sent to Taiwan, but requested to be transferred to mainland China, where she worked as a dentist. She eventually became the dentist to Mao Tse Tung and Chu Ein Lei and other government members. After one year in China she returned to Czechoslovakia. During the "Prague Spring" of 1968 she moved to Frankfurt am Main, where she founded the Chinese German Friendship League and continued to study and lecture. She was granted citizenship in Germany as a former "Sudeten Deutsche." She was named a "Hero of the Revolution" by Communist China and so honored after her death in 1977.