Mašín brothers, history, present

The International Herald Tribune offers a very good write up of a rather small event in the history of early communist rule in Czechoslovakia that has caused much controversy in more recent times.
Look back at a Cold War escape divides Czechs - International Herald Tribune In October of that year [1953], the five Czechs forced their way across Czechoslovakia's border with East Germany, headed for the American sector of divided Berlin. What they thought would take five days took four weeks. They braved starvation, frostbite, bullet wounds and a hunt by 24,000 Soviet soldiers and East German police.

Along the way, the self-proclaimed anti-communist fighters - 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, slitting the throat of a policeman with a Boy Scout knife.