My father, Ervin Hoida, who has died aged 105, was a free Czech veteran of the second world war who afterwards lived in the UK for the rest of his life.
Ervin fought with the tank battalion of the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade and supported the siege of Dunkirk, where his valour earned him the Czechoslovak War Cross. In 1945 his tank took part in the victorious allied entry into Prague.
After the war he returned to Czechoslovakia with his young family, but found that he was unable to obtain work without joining the Communist party – and so they soon came back to the UK. Ervin’s wartime exploits became known in the Czech Republic only after he had turned 100. In 2023 the Czech defence attache visited him at his home in Irby, Wirral, to award him the State Defence Cross.
Ervin was born in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, to Jewish parents, Ferdinand Hojda, an entrepreneur, and Františka (nee Enochová), a housewife. At high school he planned to study architecture, but due to the Depression he had to take up a woodworking apprenticeship and after graduating from the state vocational school for wood processing he worked as a draughtsman at a furniture factory.
In 1939, by which time he was 20, German soldiers entered Ostrava. He and his two brothers, assisted by a local police chief, obtained study visas to Italy, from where they were smuggled into France on a fishing boat. Ervin’s parents were also able to escape, in a separate adventure, and eventually settled in Israel.
Ervin ended up in Nice, where the Czechoslovak consul helped him to join the Foreign Legion, and it was from there that he eventually joined the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, which was organised and equipped by the UK.
During military training in Britain in 1943 he met Isabel Lucas, from Merseyside, who was working in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the female branch of the British army. They married in 1943.
Once hostilities had ended, and after their brief return to Ostrava, Ervin, Isabel and their first son, Peter, moved to live with Isabel’s family in Birkenhead. Ervin began working as a draughtsman for Heaton Tabb, a Liverpool-based firm that designed and manufactured interior furnishings for luxury ocean liners. Later he became executive director of the Worcester-based company Rackstraw, which made reproduction antique furniture. Fluent in German and French, he was successful in expanding their European exports.
For many years he and his family – by now with the addition of me, his second son – lived in the Malvern Hills. But after Isabel’s death in 1997, Ervin returned to Merseyside, where he met Lena Binks, whom he married in 2005.
He is survived by Lena and me, by Lena’s two sons from a previous marriage, Steve and Pete, three grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Peter died in 2023.
