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May 12th, 2008

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Controversial Paumer came home

Resistance group led by Mašín brothers had very colorful history

By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 20th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

An East German police officer shot Milan Paumer in the abdomen, and he kept the bullet. He was treated in an West Berlin hospital. enlarge

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Paumer at Josef Mašín and Zdena Mašínová's memorial in Poděbrady. enlarge

The Paumer file

Age: 76
Birthplace: Poděbrady, central Bohemia
Professions: Engineer, taxi driver
Countries lived in: Czechoslovakia (22 years), United States (48 years), Czech Republic (six years)

Milan Paumer remembers staring into the barrel of his friend Josef Mašín’s gun.

It was 1953, in a muddy East German ravine near Berlin, and the then 22-year-old Paumer had a bullet lodged in his gut. He had just been shot at point-blank range in a scuffle with an East German police officer, who had reached for his weapon before Paumer and his friends could stifle him with chloroform. With hundreds of East German and Red Army machine guns thundering behind them, Paumer clutched his swollen, bleeding belly and told Mašín to go on without him. But the boys had made a pact, and Mašín wasn’t about to let the communist authorities get Paumer alive.

Pulling a 7.65mm Walther out of his coat pocket, Mašín asked his friend if he was ready for the bullet.

“In those kinds of moments, a guy has to push his strength beyond the limits,” says the now 76-year-old Paumer, grinning over a half-liter of Pilsner in his hometown of Poděbrady, a central Bohemian spa town on the Labe (Elbe) River. He palms a cardboard box with the fingernail-size 7.65mm bullet that had once pierced his innards. On the table in front of him lies another souvenir — a rigid black-leather wallet with a lead-torn hole.

“I carried this wallet and a silver spoon in my coat pocket,” he says. “I was very lucky. If the bullet hadn’t gone through the spoon, things could have been a lot worse.”

Paumer is a former member of “the no-name group,” or in later communist terms, the Mašín Gang, an underground armed resistance faction led by the brothers Ctirad and Josef Mašín. From 1951 to 1953, the group committed acts of sabotage against the Czechoslovak communist regime. The group’s best-known antic, however, was its against-all-odds escape into West Berlin, pursued by more than 20,000 Red Army soldiers and East German police.

A Prague Post story written in August 2006 examines this story from other points of view in an interview with Barbara Masin in her book Gauntlet.

May Day rebellion

After the communist government assumed power in 1948, Paumer and his friends started congregating in the Mašíns’ Poděbrady apartment. “We had a secret meeting there once, and the [Czechoslovak secret police] StB came,” Paumer says, pointing to the five-story apartment building. “When they rang the doorbell, our weapons were all over the living room, so we packed them all up and escaped to the roof.”

With his smart, soldierly gait, the energetic septuagenarian seems capable of re-enacting the scene even now, more than 50 years later.

Paumer’s first rebellion against the communist regime was a 1948 May Day celebration, where he and the Mašíns peppered the parading communist vehicles’ path with nails.

“We didn’t come up with class warfare — that was [the communists’] idea,” he says. “We just didn’t want to ‘go with the USSR ’til the end of time.’ ”

Communism bothers Paumer out of principle: “They came in 1948, and if you had a shop or a small farm, they sent you to work in the mines or the piggery. … I didn’t like the system.”

Childhood friends

Paumer and the Mašíns are childhood friends.

“During [World War II], my father used to send me to the Mašíns’ house with bags of potatoes,” Paumer says. “It turned out to be fateful.”

The resistance group claimed its first victim in 1951, during an attempted armed robbery of a police arsenal in Chlumec, a small town in central Bohemia. Ctirad Mašín had intended to knock the police guard unconscious with a metal pipe, but the plan backfired. In the end, the guard lay sprawled on the floor, killed by Josef’s gunshot. “We never meant to shoot him,” said Paumer, who participated as the getaway driver.

Other acts of violence followed. In a second armed robbery in the town of Čelákovice, the group administered chloroform to knock out a police officer who had “seen too much.”

The sparks in Paumer’s eyes dim as he describes the scene: A gunshot would have attracted too much attention, so Ctirad killed the guard by slitting his throat. “I don’t like to talk about it, but I don’t feel guilty,” Paumer says. “In class warfare, there are no rules of engagement. My only regret is that there were so few of us — that more people didn’t join our cause.”

Paumer and the Mašín brothers continued to orchestrate sporadic acts of sabotage until 1953, when Ctirad was released from the Jáchymov uranium mines, where he was sent after attempting to escape the country in 1951. The 18 months of forced labor only bolstered Ctirad’s resolve to flee West, Paumer says.

Great escape

In October 1953, the Mašín brothers, Paumer and their friends Zbyněk Janata and Václav Švéda boarded a northbound train from Prague and headed for Hora Svaté Kateřiny, a north Bohemian town on the Czechoslovak–East German border.

They hoped to reach the U.S. sector in West Berlin and join the U.S. troops in the fight against communism.

After a night of sleeping in thickets and trekking through dense forest, the group managed to traverse “the point of no return” — the fence between Czechoslovakia and East Germany — undetected. “When we crossed, I remember joking with the boys and thinking, that’s it — from here on, it’s either Berlin or the noose,” Paumer says.

It took the fugitives another month to reach Berlin through East Germany.

Traveling predominantly on foot under the cover of night, they leapfrogged through a dense net of communist army and police, who, after the group’s failed carjacking attempt, commenced an all-out manhunt for “five foreign armed robbers.”

When the group reached Uckro, a train station just 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) south of Berlin, a police officer recognized them and called for backup.

As a cluster of cops pushed them into a corner, the Mašíns reached for their handguns and shot their way through the human barricade. Paumer and his friends scattered throughout Uckro. When they reunited, they were one man short. Disoriented by the brawl, Janata ran straight into the arms of East German police.

As the rest of the group journeyed north, Janata was interrogated and soon persuaded to divulge his friends’ identities. For a week, the remaining fugitives hid beneath a barnyard haystack.

While crossing an open field, the group was encircled, and a stray bullet tore through Švéda’s forearm.

Begging the group to go on without him, Švéda remained hidden in the woods, where he was eventually discovered by police.

Months later, both Janata and Švéda were executed in a Czechoslovak prison.

Paumer recalls the day he first met Švéda’s wife and daughter: “I’d never even known he had a family. I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. He told me that his family was the reason why he did it, that he didn’t want them to live under an oppressive regime. There wasn’t a whole lot I could say to that.”

After losing Švéda, the remainder of the group continued toward Berlin in a ditch beneath the Autobahn, where Paumer was shot during the encounter with a surprised police officer.

On the run

Bleeding internally, Paumer struggled to keep pace with the Mašín brothers until the group managed to mount the back of a Berlin-bound train. At a security checkpoint one stop before Berlin, Paumer and Josef Mašín separated from Ctirad, who maintained his grasp on the train’s underbelly while Paumer and Josef crossed the final stretch of the road on foot. “We could see Berlin on the horizon,” Paumer recalls. “But I was at the end of my rope.”

In 1953, eight years before the erection of the Berlin Wall, Berlin was still porous. At the barbed wire of the East-West border divide, Josef Mašín hoisted Paumer over a fence. “I woke up in the hospital three days later,” Paumer says.

In the sanctuary of the U.S. sector, Paumer and Josef reunited with Ctirad, who smuggled himself past the checkpoint by remaining hidden under the train.

Months later, the three friends moved to North Carolina and joined the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, where they served for five years.

For the following 43 years, Paumer lived in Miami, working as a taxi driver.

“When I first moved back in 2001, I was full of verve,” he says. “After the revolution, I thought people were going to start hanging communists on lampposts, so to speak, but that’s not what happened.”

Modern-day Mašíns

After years of being presented as cold-blooded killers by communist propaganda, Paumer and the Mašín brothers are regarded as controversial figures in modern Czech society. On Paumer’s first trip to his motherland in 1990, the headlines of left-leaning Czech newspapers Haló noviny and Právo referred to him as a killer returning to the scene of a crime; a recent letter from an 89-year-old World War II veteran addresses Paumer as “a murderer who does not deserve to live and insult the people who worked to build a socialist nation.”

Because of these antagonistic sentiments, Paumer’s lifelong friends refuse to set foot on Czech soil until the country exonerates them. “The Mašíns don’t want to come back, and I don’t blame them,” Paumer says. “Why should they? So that some asshole from [the communist media] can call them murderers?”

Although he’s often met with animosity, Paumer is optimistic. He gives speeches at high schools, lobbies to promote democracy and supports victims of the former regime.

“When young people listen to our story, it looks like they’re not even blinking,” he said. “A generation is growing up, unfazed by socialist laws. I put my trust in this new, young intelligentsia.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com

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