We were waiting for three days in the nettles for the storm to come

On their escape to Austria, Robert Ospald and Zdenek Pohl walked along the poles of high-voltage overhead transmission lines until they arrived near the village of Dyjákovičky. "There was a beet field, and in the middle of it there was an immense pole supporting high-voltage transmission lines where we hid. I guess they must have seen us because once we hid we noticed a little plane flying above our heads twice,” he recalled. The men lay on the ground in the bushes and tried to camouflage themselves with everything they had: “I had a camouflage tarp under which we hid. The place was terribly overgrown with nettles, rosehips, etc., but we held out because we didn’t know if they were still searching for us. They gave up when they couldn't find us. At the border, it was, of course, even harder.” From their shelter the men then moved a little farther to a pole located about a hundred meters from the Iron Curtain. “We stayed there, about seventy meters away from the border, and got stuck for three days until the storm came because it would have been absolutely impossible to accomplish it without the storm. There were dogs and everything was absolutely guarded,” Osplad remembers.