Bohous Fiala had gone to the same high school as me in Prague. He was one year older, very charming and athletic. He was not strong academically in math and sciences but was very good at languages. I once went hitchhiking with him and some other friends for a month through Slovakia and I tutored him in mathematics and physics along the way. We became good friends until I left for Austria. When Martin went to Prague to deliver messages, he tried to reach Bohous, but Bohous was very suspicious and would not trust Martin enough to talk to him.

Then one day in the summer of 1966, Bohous appeared at the gas station in Vienna looking for me. He had gotten a permit to vacation in Yugoslavia and went there with a friend. Somehow they found and hired a smuggler who promised to get them into Austria. The smuggler drove them in a car on a road next to a river that formed the border between Yugoslavia and Austria in the middle. The plan was that he would stop, they would strip, put their clothes in a plastic bag, swim across the river, and he would cross at a regular border crossing and pick them up on the Austrian side and drive them to Vienna.

As they were swimming, an Austrian border guard yelled at them to stop or he would shoot. Bohous’s friend turned back, but Bohous kept swimming. The border guard fired but did not hit him. Bohous made it across and hitchhiked to Vienna and came to find me at the gas station.

He moved in with me and Emil in the apartment. I knew an Austrian woman in Vienna, a distant relative of my uncle Josef Bartos’s family, and she agreed to take Bohous to the police and vouch for him so he did not have to go through Traiskirchen. In exchange he agreed to tutor her young son in guitar. She lived only a few blocks from where we lived, which made it convenient. Bohous stayed with us until he emigrated to the USA.