CZECHOSLOVAKIA: The Wonderful Machine

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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 the war.

For two years, Vaclav and his friends begged, borrowed and stole hard-to-get pieces of iron and steel, and clandestinely carried them to the machine shop. For two years, under cover of night, Vaclav hammered and riveted his precious machine together. One midnight last week it was ready—a homemade armored car carefully designed to look like a Czech army model, even down to clattering tank tracks. The conspirators decked the machine with leaves and branches to give it the look of a camouflaged vehicle on maneuvers. Then Vaclav, his wife, their two young children, and the four others piled in, and the wonderful machine set off with a rumble toward the West German border 35 miles away.

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 a very poised Mrs. Cloud. "Will you please telegraph him for me?"

In Sioux City, Husband Leonard Cloud heard about it from the newspapers. "Wonderful," said he. "It's what we've been hoping for for four years."