Word: lumber
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Refugees from Communist lands have slipped through the Iron Curtain in all manner of vehicles-in airplanes, in armored cars, even in circus wagons. Last week came word of an entire family from Red Czechoslovakia arriving in the U.S. zone of Austria buried deep within a load of lumber. The buried treasure included a baker from Susice, his son, his daughter-in-law and his two small grandchildren, aged two and four...
...Because of her flight, Bedrich's bakery was confiscated. The old man went to work for his son Marian, the foreman of a local lumberyard, and came to realize that the lumberyard itself provided an ideal avenue of escape for himself and his family. A flatcar of lumber due for export, he reasoned, could easily be loaded in such a way that a space of two cubic yards would be left free inside. Muffled within such a rolling coffin, even the cries of the children should pass undetected. Just to make sure, however, Bedrich planned to keep the children...
...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 in the Soviet zone of Austria-with the border of the U.S. zone just ahead. The Cechs...
...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 beer, the three generations...
Army found itself with 17,120 tons of written records on the war. Ever since 1945, a small army (30 to 50) of official historians has been chopping this lumber pile of information into the neat cordwood of history. Stacked to Volume 19 at present, this account of all Army operations in World War II will run to a projected 87 volumes, making it the most ambitious, or at least the biggest, historical undertaking of modern times...