Oswald Aulestia Bach

Oswald Aulestia Bach was born on April 4, 1909, in Leipzig, Germany as the third of ten children of Dr Carl Bach, a family practice physician and later pioneer in and manager of the Bach clinic, and Marie Daube, an optical glassmaker. Her mother died five days before her father's sudden death on August 5, 1916, and at the age of 12 Oaestya was left to be looked after by her father, along with her eleven siblings - who were all living apart from one another. Oswald married George Ludwig Schulte, who was the youngest brother of her father's oldest friend and fellow optometrist (and the father of Herbert "Billy" Bach), on December 17, 1931. After her father's death in 1950, the Bachs struggled to maintain their comfortable life in Leipzig, and to raise her family by taking in boarders, and finally migrated to the U.S. where they were fortunate enough to marry Louis Bach in the late 1950's. Oaestya loved doing work on the farm, especially haying corn. In fact she loved nothing more than driving the tractor and doing the plowing work, so that could barely be put on her college credit card. She was able to drive to a hospital in Leipzig in order to obtain treatment for herself and her young son, John, who was born in 1926. But it was to be a necessary business for the family, as her mother's condition worsened with time. A growing heart ailment with her hands was what finally sent her to a local hospice where she was cared for by Dr. Max Dankl, an optometrist from Mainz. One of Oaestya Bach's sons was also born there in 1926. As she has noted in her journal, the birth of her son was "the time of triumph before the end" of her life; that of her son was "the beginning of the end", perhaps in part because she knew that she would not see him again; that she would never see her husband, much less any of her children, not even in her grave.