Three Men & a Girl

The four friends--three young men and a dark-haired girl of 20--were passionately interested in aviation. They joined an amateur flying club in Poznan, western Poland, and began to ride the sky in whatever old craft they could lay their hands on. One of the men was a skilled pilot to begin with, and the others soon caught up. All four worked like Russian Stakhanovites on a plane of their own, scrounging parts and trying to make them stick together.

When the four friends surveyed their finished craft, they saw a crate whose fuselage had only three seats, whose engine was Polish, whose tail wheel came from a Nazi Messerschmitt, whose carburetors and exhaust stacks were American. A split rudder panel had been patched with strips of an old leather jacket.

One night last week, the girl and the three men began to act strangely for simple aviation enthusiasts. Around 2 a.m., they crept quietly along the barbed-wire fence of the sleepy airport, sneaked on to the field without alarming the Communist state-security police, the MVD-trained Bezpieka. They got to the plane, turned over the engine and crowded into the cabin.

Then the Bezpieka sounded the alarm. Guards rushed up, tried to pull the four out of the plane, but two of the men and the girl beat the guards off while the pilot gunned the rachitic engine, and got the plane rolling across the field. The guards' bullets nicked the craft, but the doughty little plane took off, anyway.

Soon a Polish army craft was on the fugitive's tail. By zigzagging through a cloud bank over the Baltic, the four managed to elude it, despite their slow speed (75 m.p.h.). They navigated by compass, without a map.

Three hours after their takeoff, Swedish army planes picked them up over Malmoe, escorted them in to nearby Bulltofta Airport. Said the girl: "We were fed up with the terror at home. It's good to breathe free air again."

Free air was also the goal of twelve members of the Polish navy* who mutinied last week against the five Communist officers of their minesweeper, HG-21, locked them in the officers' mess, and sailed the craft into the Swedish resort harbor of Ystad. When a Swedish pilot came aboard, one of the crew said in broken German: "We refugees; can we stay in Sweden?"

In-Ystad harbor, vacationers milled around the docked minesweeper, watched the smiling faces of the seamen on deck and (peeking through the mess porthole) the sour faces of the officers. Swedish authorities handed the ship back to the Polish captain, who headed home. Of the 16 mutineers, four at the last minute decided to go back to Communist Poland, fearing reprisals against their kin.

Among their fellow countrymen who also fled in the last two weeks:

P:A Pole who reached Trieste and freedom by caching himself in the space between the ceiling and roof of a train coach on the Danzig express.

P: Eighteen anti-Communist seamen, who jumped ship from the Polish liner Batory at Durham, England.

P:Two mechanics at the Warsaw airport, who stowed away in the tail structure of a Polish airliner, made it to Paris' Le Bourget Field.

P:Two Poles, who flew an aged biplane from Poland across Red Czechoslovakia to land near Passau, in West Germany.

* Which, like the Polish army, is commanded not by a Pole but by a Russian, Admiral Chertkov.

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