CZECHS' BID TO ESCAPE

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22585, 13 March 1948, Page 5

CZECHS' BID TO ESCAPE

MANY ATTEMPT TO CROSS BORDER REFUGEES’ DESPERATE ACTIONS (N.Z.P.A.—Reuter— Copyright.) (11.30 a.m.) LONDON, March 12. Refugees from Czechoslovakia reaching Hof, Germany, said that increasing numbers are trying to cross the border.

The Associated Press correspondent at Hof quotes one refugee as saying that the Czech border guards fired on and killed an 18-year-old boy and wounded . a woman trying to cross the frontier into Germany.

The refugee added that persons trying to escape were becoming increasingly desperate, carrying revolvers and rifles. One group smashed a car through the frontier control point gates. The guards have now established heavier roadblocks.

* The correspondent says that 137 Czechs who have reached the American zone in the vicinity of Hof in the past few days left for Schwabach to join 200 other Czech refugees. Thousands Mourn in Prague

Peasant women with black shawls over their shoulders, unifonrled officials and family groups were among the estimated 100,000 people who waited in a two-mile long queue to pass the bier of M. Jan Masaryk in Czernin Palace today, says the British United Press correspondent in Prague. Many mourners bought bunches of white mountain flowers from sellers who moved along the queue. M. Masaryk’s body, dressed in a blue business suit, lay on a simple bier in the great hall of the Palace. The New York Communist paper Daily Worker, in an editorial on M. Masaryk’s suicide, says: “He was not as the press so cynically proclaims over his dead body, ‘a hero of the west’; he was, instead, a tragic victim of this 'West,'' which is only another name for the capitalist moneylords and their faithful followers in upper class society." Under the headline “Masaryk—Victim of the Marshall Plan." an article in the paper says it was the terror of Marshall planners ' manufactured and generated from here which M. Masaryk was not strong enough to endure and defeat.”