Time Machine: Escape from behind the Iron Curtain

Czechoslovakia native Libuse 'Lila' Hrdonkova met Leonard E. Cloud in 1945 when he was stationed with the U.S. Army's 8th Armored Division at Stod, near Pilsen. The couple dated for about three months before Leonard's tour of duty was up and he had to return home to Sioux City.

Leonard went back to Czechoslovakia as a civilian in 1949 to marry Lila and bring her back to the United States. After their wedding on Nov. 29, they discovered that the Communist-controlled government would not give Lila a passport.

'In the few months I was there, restrictions became much more severe,' Leonard said.

When his visa expired in January 1950, Lila went with him as far as the border. Leonard went home alone, unaware that Lila would soon take part in a bold plot to escape Communist Czechoslovakia.

The group of eight Czechs were led by Vaclav Uhlik, 37, an auto mechanic, who salvaged an abandoned, stripped down British halftrack scout car from World War II and eight tires.

Uhlik also was a woodworker and the vehicle he began to restore looked like ones used by woodsmen. When he bought something for the homemade tank, he would say that it was for his 'lumber machine.'

He and mechanics Joseph Pisarik and Walter Hora retrofitted the vehicle with a new motor and salvaged armor plates. When the group made their escape, they wanted the vehicle to resemble an armored truck in order to fool border guards.

Vaclav, his wife and two children, Pisarik, Hora, tailor Vaclav Krejcirik, and Lila all crammed into the rebuilt armored car and headed for the border in the fall of 1952. They got to within 10 miles of the border when it was apparent that the motor was not strong enough. Fortunately, they were not seen and returned home to try again.

Vaclav purchased a new motor and the men changed the vehicle design to make it lighter. The tank's plates were painted military green and camouflage to make it look like a Czech army tank on maneuvers.

The plan was to leave at midnight July 25, 1953, but the steel plates took longer to mount than expected, and the group still had to pack belongings. They were finally on their way at about 3:15 a.m.

Lila said when she left home for the last time, she knew she might never see her family again, but she couldn't tell them anything because it would be dangerous if they knew.

The tank, with two men posing as soldiers in the turret and the others crouched inside, bounced over 40 miles through the forest to the border with West Germany. When they were 40 yards from the border, Uhlik stopped, pulled up the wheels and lowered the tank tracks. At the border gate, a lone guard waved them from a tank trap into a safe lane. As they passed through, he saw his mistake, but it was too late.

The makeshift tank barreled through barbed wire, dropped its wheels into place and sped several miles westward before it was stopped by the U.S. Sixth Armored Cavalry.

The occupants crawled out of the tank's turret and immediately asked for asylum. The curious vehicle was towed away by an army truck for intelligence officers to examine.

When they were safe, Lila told reporters, 'I want to get to America and my husband the fastest way. He doesn't know yet that I have escaped. Will you please telegraph him for me?'

When Leonard learned of his wife's escape, he told reporters, 'I am a very happy man.' He said he heard from Lila every couple of weeks, but he knew nothing of the group's plans.

During a transatlantic conversation from Germany on Aug. 10, she told him that the exact location of the refugees was kept secret by authorities to protect them from possible seizure by the Communists. Each of them was given a code number, and armed guards accompanied them whenever they left their quarters.

The military even withheld information about Lila's flight to the United States to reunite with her husband.

Lila, 30, and Leonard, 28, finally were reunited at the Sioux City airport on Sept. 18, 1953.

The 5-ton tank was shipped to New York in September 1953 and exhibited across the country in support of Radio Free Europe.

The Andrew Polehnas hosted Lila when she came to Cedar Rapids on Jan. 4, 1954, to speak to the Rotary at the Montrose Hotel and to be the guest of honor at a meeting of Sokol at Sokol Hall.

When asked how it felt to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, she said, 'It feels like escaping hell!'

As the wife of an American, she said, it was just about as dangerous for her to stay in Czechoslovakia as it was to escape.

When the Communists took over in 1948, she said, they told people everything would be wonderful, that they would be the owners of everything.

'People found that was a lie,' she said. 'The state owned everything. The people were just slaves. They weren't allowed to have opinions. They weren't even allowed to complain.'

She said Communists started by taking over big factories and farmland. They worked their way down to smaller industries and finally forced out even the small craftsmen by withholding materials and labor.

'The state owns everything,' she said 'That is the exact opposite of what the Communists preached to us when they took over.'

On April 12, 1957, Lila Cloud, along with 66 other people, became an American citizen in U.S. District Court in Sioux City. By then, she and Leonard had two children. Leonard died in 1983 and Lila died in 2012 at age 90.