Clear Track

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.

Four years ago Baker Bedrich Cech's daughter had slipped out of the country alone to marry an American G.I. 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 drugged during the trip.

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 at the Austrian border.

All Aboard. One day last month, using some 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 in the Soviet zone of Austria--with the border of the U.S. zone just ahead. The Cechs ate and drank the last of their supplies, including a well-salted salami. Then the train stopped and began backing into Czechoslovakia again.

At first the Cechs thought they had been discovered. Their horror was soon 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 the train and found nothing amiss.

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 beer, the three generations of fugitive Cechs rolled over the U.S. border into Linz. Next stop: Earlham, Iowa (pop. 771), the home of Bedrich's daughter, Mrs. Ronald K. Brown.

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