Josef and Ctirad Masin, Heroes

Memo From Prague - 3 Czech Friends, Cast as Heroes and as Murderers - NYTimes.com

In October of that year, the five men battled their way across the Iron Curtain heading for the American sector of a divided Berlin. They wanted to join American troops in what they thought would be a global conflagration between Western democracies and Soviet Communism.

To get there, the five — the brothers Josef and Ctirad Masin and their childhood friends Milan Paumer, Zbynek Janata and Vaclav Sveda — hijacked cars, stole submachine guns, drugged adversaries with chloroform, broke into police stations and killed six people, including a police officer whose throat was slit with a Boy Scout knife.

The journey that they thought would take five days took four weeks, and they braved starvation, frostbite and bullet wounds. Three of the men eventually reached West Berlin, where they were debriefed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Then they joined the United States Army in hopes of liberating communist Czechoslovakia. The other two — Mr. Janata and Mr. Sveda — were captured by the East German police and executed.

The current Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, a liberal, decided in March to honor the three survivors as heroes, no doubt expecting some controversy in a nation still grappling with its Communist past. But the government was not prepared for a searing debate that encapsulated all the ambivalence associated with the country’s recent history

Heroes.

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