Word: pilsen
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When the local Reds came around one day and told Vaclav Uhlik that they were going to nationalize his small machine shop in Pilsen, Vaclav made up his mind. He would escape to the West. Cautiously, he enlisted some friends in his plan: two Czech soldiers, a gardener named Josef Pisarik, Libuse Cloud, who had married an American G.I. from Sioux City back in 1949, but had never been able to get out of Czechoslovakia to join him. Then Vaclav swapped his most precious possession, a diesel engine, for a beaten-up British halftrack abandoned after...
Sleepy police patrols in Pilsen hardly glanced at it. By 5 a.m. the car had reached the barbed-wire border area. Vaclav wrenched the wheel, lurched off the road and into the wire barrier. Czech border guards stood by, mouths agape, as the machine snorted through the wire and crossed into West Germany. None fired, or even raised a Tommy gun. The car rumbled westward for several miles before West German police caught up with it. Vaclav "unbuttoned" the armor and out tumbled eight happy Czechs. "I want to get to my husband and the U.S. the fastest way," said...
...most complete report of what happened came not from the usual "well-informed sources" but from the Reds' own Pravda of Pilsen, center of the giant Lenin (formerly Skoda) Works. It was written in Communist doubletalk, but remarkably candid for all that: "On June 1, some politically unaware workers let themselves be persuaded into believing that the currency reform was aimed at them, and that they would not be able to live on their new wages and would go hungry. They staged antistate demonstrations ... In the town hall rioters tore down pictures of Czech state leaders and hung...
Rudolf Slansky, a tall, red-haired butcher's son from a village near Pilsen, was a devoted Communist. A member of the Czech party since he was 18, he made a fine hatchetman-unmoved by compassion, unhampered by principle, unburdened with personal loyalties. Unlike so many Czech politicos who fled to London in World War II, he went to Moscow. There he lived for six years in a special compound reserved for the elite among foreign Communists. He became a better Muscovite than a Czech, which made him a fine teammate for another graduate of the special compound, Klement...
...Wife Snubbed. When the express stopped at Pilsen, Karel Truksa, a husky railroader, got on. Two years ago he had been stationmaster at Asch, a mile from the German border. The Communists had found two men hiding in his house "without documents," and Truksa spent five months in a concentration camp. Now he had only a small job at the station in Eger (Cheb...