Word: bedrich
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August 1968 was a traumatic month for all Czechs, but it was piquantly and privately so for Vlasta Gabriel, the young mother of two small children. Ten days after Warsaw Pact armies rumbled into Czechoslovakia. Vlasta's husband Bedrich, an electrician and occasional truck driver in Decin, bundled the couple's children into the family car and defected to the West. He eventually settled with his émigré mother in Yucaipa, Calif., (pop. 26,000) and died of lung cancer not long after. Vlasta plunged into a lonely, uphill custody battle for her son and daughter...
There were other details to be thought of as well. It would be necessary, Bedrich reckoned, to line their traveling space with tar paper, to throw sniffing police dogs off the scent. They would need an escape hatch in the floor of the car, and a system of air vents to prevent suffocation. In case this failed to work, son Marian promised to provide a tank of oxygen from the lumberyard machine shop. During the next five months, while Marian checked him in daily on the lumberyard time clock, Bedrich Cech made four exploratory trips checking train times and routes...
...faulty loadings in the past as an excuse, Boss Marian sent his workers home and announced that he personally was going to load the next flatcar. At dusk, carrying their drugged children, their tools, their tar paper, the oxygen tank, some food, water, and the inevitable bottle of slivovitz, Bedrich and his daughter-in-law Drahomira climbed into the space Marian had left in the lumber. Marian followed, pulling some boards over his head. As the train pulled out for Trieste, the men went to work lining their tiny stateroom with the tar paper. Two days later they were...
...dwarfed by the realization that they had no more water. Their throats parched with the salty salami, the children cried piteously. "It was the most terrible experience of my life," said grandfather Cech later. For three days the flatcar lay on a siding near the Czechoslovak border. At last Bedrich decided for the sake of the children to give himself up. The family tumbled out of the car, he said later, "like dead flies, cramped and almost too weak to stand." Marian irritably scolded his wife for being clumsy. Drahomira burst out crying. Then they learned that guards had checked...
Beer & Skittles. Next day, refreshed by this news, and by water from a nearby spring, Bedrich and Marian Cech took a desperate chance. Armed with their tools and Marian's lumberyard identification, they marched straight up to the stationmaster and told him that they had been sent to expedite a carload of lumber urgently needed at Trieste. The gamble paid off. Soon afterward, thanks to a railroad official too used to bureaucratic interference to question it, their car was newly coupled to a fast, westward-bound train. With their secret compartment now stocked with hot coffee and thirst-quenching...