Word: vlasta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Friedländer, 46, now an Israeli historian, was a child of seven in Czechoslovakia at the outset of the war. His parents were nonpracticing Jews, and the religion that Pavel, as he was called, knew most about as a boy was the Roman Catholicism of his beloved governess Vlasta. It was this happenstance, perhaps, that made it possible for him to endure the enormous change in his life that occurred when he was ten. The family fled to France in 1939, but by the summer of 1942 they knew, as his mother wrote in a letter that has survived...
...tanks crunched into Czechoslovakia, an electrician named Bedrich Gabriel fled the country with his two young children, leaving his wife behind. He settled with his mother in Yucaipa, Calif., 15 miles from San Bernardino. It seemed a poignant displacement of the cold war, nothing more. Gabriel's wife Vlasta, a component designer for a construction firm, opted to stay in Czechoslovakia, where she won a divorce and legal custody of the children. When Bedrich died in 1969, Vlasta, who had remarried, decided to ask U.S. courts for custody of the kids. The father had entrusted the children-Vlasta...
Last week Judge Turner surprised almost everyone when he finally ruled that the children should remain. Vlasta reported her brother's reaction: "Yippee! Hooray! We're going to stay." The judge denied that his decision was politically motivated and declared that the mother is "intelligent and probably sensitive." Claiming what to skeptical observers seemed like an extraordinary degree of psychological insight, he added: "My observations in the past six weeks just confirmed what apparently she is; she finds it difficult to express warmth and feeling. I'm sure she's got them -maybe...
...debate over the children has grown emotionally supercharged. The story is circulating in Yucaipa that just before he died, Gabriel told several people that he was a political prisoner and was being used as a human guinea pig in a Czech cancer-research center prior to escaping-events that Vlasta hotly denies and indeed seem unlikely. Last November the children appeared on an NBC television news program expressing their wish not to go back to the place where "they put daddy in prison because he believed in God." That appeal generated considerable response from the people of Yucaipa, who have...
...Vlasta now is agonizing over whether to fly to California to attend next week's guardianship hearing. She is torn between her desire to be on hand, and her inability to handle the expense involved. Vlasta says that she still does not understand how there could be any question of whether her children should live with her. "At first I thought of course the American courts would return my children to me, that justice would prevail, but now I'm not so sure any more...