Rita cosby images11/22/2023 but one that he eventually revealed to the journalist. It is the story of a daughter coming to understand a father whose past was too painful to share with those he loved the most, too terrible to share with a child. And it was time to tell her father’s story. “I do believe the Lord has a timing for everything,” Rita says. Eighty percent of her dad’s unit didn’t survive, and she says those who did make it, didn’t share the story. As she started the journey to tell this story, she realized it was also important for history. “I can at least feel like I tried,” she says. She wanted to give her father the opportunity for closure. This is Richard Cosby’s story, and one Rita felt the need to tell. After months in the camp, and weighing only 90 pounds, he and a few others finally made a daring escape from the concentration camp through the sewers. After being nearly fatally wounded, he was taken into captivity and sent to a German POW camp near Dresden. Before the Warsaw Uprising, he lied about his age to join the Resistance and actively fight the enemy to the last bullet. By the time he was fifteen, he was covertly distributing anti-Nazi propaganda a few blocks from the Warsaw Ghetto. It filled her with immense pride… and chilled her to the bone.Īt the age of thirteen, barely even adolescent, her father had seen his hometown decimated by bombs. I remember thinking, ‘I hope he’s ready, I hope he’s okay.” She reconnected with her father and when she finally persuaded him to break his silence, she heard of his harrowing past. “And I remember I was nervous making the call. She went home, did some research, and ultimately called her father, a man she wasn’t certain was even still alive. Gazing at the profoundly telling relics, the well-known journalist realized that her father’s story was one she could not allow him to keep secret any longer. But sitting by the open suitcase, confused and overwhelmed, Rita remembers saying, “I have to forgive this man.” She knew that, as a Christian, she needed to walk the walk and truly forgive her father. He’d divorced her mother after 32 years of marriage, and left, the then teenage Rita, without her father. Rita and her father hadn’t spoken in a very long time. What Rita found in the suitcase was just a glimpse into her father’s past, but immediately, Rita made a decision. Now, however, Rita held in her hand stark mementos from the youth of the man she knew only as Richard Cosby, proud American: a worn Polish Resistance armband rusted tags bearing a prisoner number and the words Stalag IVB and an identity card for an ex-POW bearing the name Ryszard Kossobudzki. He had always refused to answer questions. “When I pasted it all together, I just wept because I knew what it meant to be a prisoner of war.” Rita knew little of her father’s past: just that he had left Poland after World War II, and that his many scars, visible and not, bore mute witness to some past tragedy. One item in the suitcase stood out: a POW tag. She says she was shocked and deeply saddened when she realized what she’d found. Opening a battered tan suitcase, she discovered it belonged to her father-the enigmatic man who had divorced her mother and left their family when Rita was still a teenager. Years after her mother’s death, Rita Cosby finally nerved herself to sort through her mother’s stored belongings, never dreaming what a dramatic story was waiting for her.
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