Underground Gives Help

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31769, 28 August 1968, Page 17

Underground Gives Help

(N.ZP.A.-Reuter —Copyright;

(The following story is from an N.Z.P A.-Reuter correspondent, Lionel Walsh, who was able to enter occupied Czechoslovakia and drive from Bratislava, the Slovak capital, to Prague to join the three-man N.Z.P.A.-Reuter team already there.)

PRAGUE, Aug. 26.

Mile-long columns of Soviet troops and armour rumbled northwards toward Prague today but it was still possible to drive about Czechoslovakia without meeting a single Red Army soldier. The Czechoslovak underground knows exactly where the Russians and their allies are, and the secret of a trip untroubled by Russian checkpoints and tanks is to rely on local guides. As soon as I got into Czechoslovakia last night, frontier officials marked out on my map a Russian-free cross-country route eastward to Bratislava.

In spite of the chaos of blacked-out roads and signposts pointing in the wrong direction, I was able to follow the route unerringly through the instructions of willing Slovak helpers in every village on the way. At one point a teen-age motor-cyclist provided an escort through driving rain in pitch darkness. Elsewhere Czechoslovak Army patrols guided our car. The British and United States passports we carried were passports to an untroubled journey. While Red Army units groped their way uncomfortably about Czechoslovakia—without food, water, or a roof over their heads—travel for Western journalists was as easy as human good will could make it The Russians are said by clandestine radio to be desperately short of all supplies, including petrol. Their patrols have been confiscating jerrycans of petrol carried by Western motorists and rifling their baggage for food. But our Czechoslovak guides made telephone calls along the route ahead to ensure punctual working when our car arrived.

“As long as you are not Russians, we will do anything we can for you. Be sure you tell the world what they are

doing to us,” we were told again and again. Everywhere people huddled round transistor sets listening attentively to the instructions of the clandestine stations on what to do to impede the invaders. Sometimes a message comes over the air telling of the arrest of a resistance worker and saying that a certain car should be stopped. Quickly a rescue operation is mounted by the Army or local police. One of the mysteries of the invasion has been the inability so far of the occupation forces to track down the myriad transmitters which are organising passive resistance. They are the key to the

stubborn defiance the Czechs are displaying. If the Russians succeed in silencing them it will be a grave and perhaps decisive blow to morale.

In spite of the unprecedented national unity the invasion has caused, people are wary of possibly retaliation if hardliners loyal to Moscow get control of the country.

Village walls are scrawled with slogans like “Death to Collaborators” and many Czechoslovaks believe collaborators are a bigger danger to Czechoslovak sovereignty than is the Red Army. An old woman at the reception desk of a small country hotel said today: “I hung black flags out of the win-

dow last night and was threatened afterwards that I would be hanged for it.” Yet the vast majority of people in small towns and villages up and down the country are in no way cowed by the tanks that are filling up the roads. Newspapers are getting out clandestine sheets even in the most out-of-the-way areas. They are distributed by boys on bicycles who thrust them through car windows or dump them for anyone to pick up.