HAPPY REUNION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26413, 18 March 1947, Page 4

HAPPY REUNION

MOTHER AND SON WAR-TIME PARTING ENDS p.A. AUCKLAND, Mar. 17. Supported by two air hostesses and a member of the company’s ground staff, a slight and stooped 72-year-old woman made her way slowly up the landing stage in front of the Tasman Empire Ariways base at Mechanics Bay to-night at the end of a. long journey by air from Paris to rejoin her son whom she last saw four days before the war broke out. She was Mrs Hermine Steiner, a widow, of Prague. Her son. who is a carpenter in Wellington, was waiting among the crowd behind the barrier when the passengers from the Sydney flying boat were brought to the landing stage by launch. She had taken only a few hesitant steps along the wooden platform when he climbed over the barrier and raced, down to greet her after a wait of over seven years. Mrs Steiner, who cannot speak English, escaped from Prague to France when the Germans entered Czechoslovakia in 1938, The French Government granted a passport to her son and his wife in September, 1939. and they left for New Zealand, but Mrs Steiner was refused a visa. Throughout the war she lived in a French hostel. . leaving there only about a fortnight ago when she flew from Paris to London to begin the 14,000-mile journey by air to live with her son and his wife and her two grandchildren whom she has never! seen. '