Double Czech

In August 1968, ten days after Soviet 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, 9, and Bedrich, 7--to a local couple, Roy and Madeline Smith, who became their foster parents; after Bedrich's death, the Smiths filed suit for legal guardianship (TIME, Jan. 31).

That made the story a particularly wrenching drama. A Czech government official promised trouble if the children were not awarded to the mother. The staunch Yucaipa community felt strongly that they should stay. Three weeks ago, when California State Superior Court Judge Don Turner started hearing testimony in the case, angry Czech refugees demonstrated outside the court, demanding that the children be allowed to remain in the U.S. The townspeople had held rallies, raffles, recycling drives and Tupperware parties to raise $3,800 to pay for the expensive legal maneuvers they hoped would keep the children here.

At first Judge Turner felt he would have no choice but to return the children to their mother, who, by Czech standards, could provide them with a comfortable home. She had flown to California to press her cause. But in the three weeks before the hearing began, she was able to make little headway toward gaining the children's affection. On the day the hearing started the mother and the children were actually avoiding each other.

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 it's the nature of living in a Communist society or her own nature or maybe it's Women's Lib. I don't know."

Lawyer David Leavitt, who argued the case for the American foster parents, insisted that neither was at issue. He observed: "It is not enough under the laws of California to have simply given birth . . . The custody case, my argument and the judge's decision were all based entirely upon the actual relationship between the children and their mother, and nothing else. The decision would have been identical whether the mother had lived in Switzerland or India or Oshkosh."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.