Parachute to Berlin by Lowell Bennett && Alan Bennett

Author:Lowell Bennett && Alan Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Slata Praha

I lived in or near Prague for five weeks and must confess that I learned almost nothing of the Czech language. A few aspects of the people I could grasp, their attitude toward the war, toward the Germans and the Allies, their way of living and their expectations for the future—these I believe I glimpsed. But their language was a totally different matter and I now recall no more than a dozen words and a handful of phrases.

Slata Praha, Golden Prague, they called their beautiful capital, the city of a thousand spires. I shall return there one day to thank a few of its inhabitants, and in particular the family M, for their wonderful hospitality.

But that first morning, in a shack near the railway yards, I was far from feeling at home. I sat on a wooden box for nearly an hour, watching through a small window, before the workman returned. He knocked at the door before opening it and coming in, evidently made cautious by the sight of my gun at our first meeting. He was not a big man, but strength showed clearly from his broad shoulders and large, firm hands. I hoped I would not have to fight with him.

“Are you all right? Did you drink some coffee?” he asked.

“Yes. Did you call the police?”

“I told you I would not betray you,” he answered in seeming anger. “Let us have some more coffee.”

We talked together for a few minutes and I knew he was trying to understand how I could be an American flier. He explained that the Protectorate’s border (enclosing Bohemia and Moravia) was guarded and that all passenger trains were stopped. “You were fortunate,” he said. “Many of the goods trains are also examined before they cross the frontier.”

While he talked, I washed in a bucket of cold water, scrubbing prodigious quantities of railroad filth from my face and hands. I dried myself on a strip of lining torn out of the stolen overcoat.

He offered little hope of my continuing toward France. “If you stay here you will probably be safe. But if you try to leave you will probably be caught.

“I have a friend who lived for seven years in New York” he continued. “If you wish, I will take you to him and perhaps he can help you.”

The family M, who lived on the western outskirts of Prague, were good friends of America. The father, Pappa Vlasiv—a small, humorous, bald old man—had saved three thousand dollars while in New York. before the last war and had returned to Prague for the sole purpose of bringing his wife and sons to the States. But the war had interfered and he had remained in Czechoslovakia, then a part of the Austrian Empire, and continued his cabinetmaking. His memories of New York, and of Chicago where he had once traveled, were those of a fabulous, story-book land where everything could happen and usually did.

The mother, a dark, energetic little woman of sixty-two years, was

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