Since we could not freely communicate with our families in Czechoslovakia — correspondence with someone from a Western country was enough to attract the attention of the Czech secret police — we found another way. One of the Austrian workers at the gas station was a man named Martin. He was married to a Slovak woman who lived in Bratislava and he drove to Czechoslovakia once in a while to visit her. We paid him to deliver messages to our families and friends in Prague on those trips. He had a beautiful and powerful 4-door MG. When he was driving my sister somewhere in Prague one time, he had to brake suddenly and someone behind him could not stop fast enough and ran into his car. He was not happy about it.

Through Martin we were able to communicate things that could not be put in a letter. For example, Kudibal asked me through Martin to buy tie rod ends for his girlfriend Vera’s old Opel car, since he could not find them anywhere in Czechoslovakia. I bought them and sent them back with Martin. One time my mother sent me a Svickova dish through him.

Martin also played a key role in something I tried around that time. The Australian Mission in Vienna had accepted my emigration application in March 1966 and AFCR had scheduled my departure, but I asked them to postpone it. Word had spread through the camp that the StB — the Czech secret police — were occasionally allowing parents of Czech refugees to travel West for a visit, under the official pretense that the parents would try to persuade their children to come home. In practice both sides understood it was a fiction. The parents wanted to see their children one more time before they crossed the ocean; neither side had any real intention of persuading anyone to go back. The StB allowed it because they genuinely hoped some parents would succeed and those cases could be held up as propaganda. Some people in the camp had succeeded in arranging such visits and had a good time with their families before emigrating. So I sent a request through Martin for my mother to try the same. She went to the StB, but they simply turned her down and told her it would be a waste of her time. Since I had tricked them into believing I was a legitimate tourist planning to return, they had no interest in doing me any favors. The visit never happened.

Martin was an important connection to everything we had left behind.