Word: fortressed
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Courage. Kurt Schumacher had worked fiercely all his life, and always in opposition. The only son of a Prussian civil servant in the fortress town of Kulm (now part of Red Poland), he joined the Kaiser's army in 1914; six months later, his right arm was severed at the shoulder by a Russian machine-gun burst. He became an ardent Socialist, railing unheard at the "Kaiser's war." By the time he could get anyone to listen, as a brash Socialist Deputy in the moribund Weimar Republic, the enemy was Hitler. Schumacher told Goebbels...
...Right Fork. When the zero hour came, Johnny, pale and nervous, stood watch while Gavenda bloodied his fingers tearing down the last bricks. At 4 p.m. the head guard signaled that the day's work was over, and the guards descended from the fortress walls. Gavenda crawled out of the recessed gun port, got a firm hold on the outer wall and swung himself down to the ground. The others tumbled after him. The six men made a dash for a railroad embankment, ran under its cover to a bridge across the Vah River. Gavenda almost fell over...
...Gavenda's work detail planned the escape. Prison guards armed with submachine guns patrolled the top of the fortress wall, but the work detail wangled a job close to the tunnel entrance. Each day one man crept into the tunnel and scratched away at the still soft mortar. One of the six men seemed too weak to make the break. This was the one they called Johnny, a shy, silent 24-year-old with pinched cheeks and the jumpy eyes of a man who has spent a long time in solitary. He was having trouble with his feet...
Leopoldov Prison in central Czechoslovakia is a 17th century fortress with walls 39 feet thick. There last December Stepan Gavenda. a tough Czech worker serving a rap for anti-Communist activity, saw a prison work detail taking bricks, sand and cement into a tunnel in the fortress wall. Said Gavenda to his frailer friend Jaroslav Bures. a bookkeeper also convicted for antiCommunism: "Where there is a hole to be filled in, there's a hole to get out." At the first opportunity they explored the tunnel, which proved to be an old gun port, and found...
Dedicated Sentinel. Novelist Buzzati's fortress, which symbolizes the abode of brave souls, stands on a lonely mountaintop. It commands a view of a misty steppe to the north, from where it may at any moment be attacked. In Dostoevsky's day the invaders were known as "Nihilists" ; today, Buzzati calls them "Tartars." But their name is unimportant; what matters is that they represent the forces of spiritual despair and destruction...