Two on the Seesaw

August 1968 was a traumatic month for all Czechs, but it was piquantly and privately so for Vlasta Gabriel, the young mother of two small children. Ten days after Warsaw Pact armies rumbled into Czechoslovakia. Vlasta's husband Bedrich, an electrician and occasional truck driver in Decin, bundled the couple's children into the family car and defected to the West. He eventually settled with his emigre mother in Yucaipa, Calif., (pop. 26,000) and died of lung cancer not long after. Vlasta plunged into a lonely, uphill custody battle for her son and daughter. The case is still pending in a San Bernardino courtroom, and could easily snowball into a major East-West propaganda confrontation. Whatever the outcome, it has already become something of a diplomatic cause celebre.

Vlasta refused to go along when the rest of her family fled or to join them later because, she now says, she did not want to leave her home and country. She also claims she was advised by Czech legal authorities that she would be able to get her children back. Vlasta filed for divorce in Czechoslovakia, sued for the custody of the children, and asked the International Red Cross to help her get them back.

First Round. The divorce and decree theoretically awarding Vlasta custody were granted in October of 1968, and she later remarried. There the matter would probably have rested had not Bedrich died, since it is unlikely that a U.S. court would have ordered the children home while their father was living. But his death left the children wards of the court, since his mother was unable to care for them.

During Gabriel's illness, the children--named after their parents, Bedrich, now 7, and Vlasta, 8--were often cared for by a local couple, Mr. and Mrs. Roy Smith. Smith, an Air Force Reserve sergeant, and his wife, a nurse's aide, eagerly added them to their own household of three children upon Gabriel's death and filed suit for legal guardianship. The couple's claim was based on Gabriel's deathbed wish that the children remain in the U.S., and also on the argument that they were too Americanized to return home. Vlasta pressed her case through a lawyer hired by the Czech embassy.

The Smiths lost the first round of their fight when a U.S. juvenile court ruled last November that the children should be returned home. Their mother was told that they would be flown from Los Angeles to Prague, but when she went to the airport they were not on the designated plane. Aided by a last-minute community appeal organized by one of the children's teachers in their Catholic school, Sister Sean Patrice, the Smiths had won a temporary restraining order on the juvenile court decision, and were appealing their petition for guardianship.

A Good Home. The Czech press headlined Vlasta's setback and for three days blasted away about the "kidnaping." Then the Czech government apparently decided to cool the publicity and generate some diplomatic heat instead, even though the State Department is powerless to intervene, or even comment, while the case is in a U.S. court. If the court ruled against Vlasta, a Czech Foreign Ministry official warned, "Czech-American relations will be disturbed for a long time to come." The Czechs also say that they are prepared to put pretty Vlasta, 31, on display at a press conference if the children are not returned.

Vlasta, however, is anxious to keep politics and propaganda out of the case. She has adamantly refused to see Czech journalists or pose for photographs. "This is a private matter," she told TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott. "I just want my children to come back home and live with their mother. I can give them love and a good home." Indeed, the home to which the children would return seems secure and wholesome. Vlasta, a component designer for a construction company, and her second husband, who is working his way through catering school, share with her parents a comfortable six-room stucco house overlooking the Elbe River valley. She is a churchgoing Catholic, and the family is well off by Czech standards.

Meanwhile, the 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 so far contributed $2,500 to a legal defense fund.

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."

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