The identity card of Maria Gulovich, 1942.
Museum of Slovak National Uprising, Banska Bystrica, Slovakia
MARIA WAS VERY disappointed. She and a Hungarian Italian American named Lieutenant Tibor Keszthelyi had just received some terrible news. The Soviet army base, their destination, was still four or five days away on foot, and their German pursuers were swiftly approaching the area. She, Keszthelyi, and a group of Americans had been trudging through blizzarding mountains for a long time in a desperate attempt to avoid capture by the Germans. Maria and the men didn’t thoroughly trust the Soviets, but since they were technically allies on the same side of the war, reaching them was the group’s only possible way to avoid capture and certain death at the hands of the Germans. But the Soviet army—or the “Red” army as it was sometimes called—kept moving farther and farther away, always at least several days out of reach.
Maria was prepared to go back to the others in camp with the bad news, but Lieutenant Keszthelyi stopped her. He spread his parka on the ground and beckoned Maria to sit next to him. They sat in silence together for several minutes. They had become good friends during the past months, working closely together, partly because they both spoke fluent Hungarian and could understand each other well. And he had saved her life just days before when she had slipped on a steep icy trail as they and the others in their group tried to cross the Chebenec Mountain. She had come to feel that if she allowed herself to, she could easily fall in love with this kind, handsome man who now sat beside her.
After a few moments, Keszthelyi broke the silence. “I want to tell you again how brave you are and that you deserved so much better,” he said to Maria. “I keep seeing you walking down Park Avenue in New York, where a bright, beautiful girl like you belongs, and not in these godforsaken villages risking your life for us.”
“You Americans are the brave ones,” she answered, “because you volunteered to come here to help this little godforsaken country and the people in these villages. I had no choice.”
Actually, Maria had made many choices, choices that had brought her to that very moment. No one had forced Maria to spend a month of nights sleeping in the grade school classroom where she was a teacher in the town of Hrinova, Slovakia, while two Jews hid in her own tiny room next door. When a leader in the Slovakian Resistance, Captain Milan Polak, discovered what she was doing, he gave Maria an ultimatum: either face Nazi arrest for hiding the Jews or work for him as a courier for the Resistance. She chose to become a courier after Polak promised to help the Jews find other shelter.
THE DAWES MISSION The Slovakian Uprising was waged by the CFI (Czech Slovak Forces of the Interior), a large (50,000 to 60,000) band of pro-Allied, non-Communist Slovak partisans. They were in a struggle for Slovakia’s independence against the German-controlled Czech Republic and the Soviets who wanted to control Slovakia after the war. The headquarters of the CFI was in the Slovakian town of Banska Bystrica, and it was here that the American Dawes team was stationed in 1944 to accomplish a two-sided mission. The first, and more obvious, reason for the mission was to evacuate stranded Allied airmen in the area and also assist the CFI with intelligence operations against the Germans. The Dawes team was so successful at locating strategic Nazi bombing sites that Hitler became enraged and vowed to forsake the Geneva Conventions (which forbade the mistreatment of enemy soldiers) and shoot any Allied airmen on the spot.
The second part of the Dawes mission was top secret. The team knew of the Soviet Union’s postwar plans to seize control of both the Czech Republic and Slovakia (known as Czechoslovakia since 1918), and they were trying to gather information regarding those plans.
But it seemed that Maria had no choice when, abandoned by the Soviets she had been ordered to work for as an interpreter in Banska Bystrica, the town that had been a center of the Slovakian Uprising, she was kindly invited to flee the oncoming German onslaught with the Americans who had been using that town as a base of operations. They were working for the OSS, a U.S. espionage organization. Their reason for being in Slovakia was called the Dawes mission.
The Americans involved with the Dawes mission treated Maria so respectfully in comparison with the treatment she received from many of her previous associates (one of whom had attempted to rape her) that after they had escaped the Germans together in Banska Bystrica and the men formally invited Maria to join the Dawes team, Maria gladly accepted. Her direct superior, General Rudolf Viest, a Slovak commander whom Maria respected, gave her a formal release from the disintegrating CFI, telling her, “You stay with the Americans, Maria. You know the mountains, the languages, the people, and the political situation. Help them in any way you can.”
While serving as a guide, interpreter, and cook to the American men on the Dawes team as they fled on foot through the snowy Tatra Mountains, always just a few hours in front of their Nazi pursuers, Maria had many chances to leave the Americans. It would have been in her best interest to do so, as she was constantly reminded by the Slovakian villagers whom she approached for food and shelter on behalf of herself and the Americans. She didn’t take the villagers’ advice. She stayed with the Americans.
General Viest and Maria both understood that the Americans were now running for their lives because they had come to Slovakia largely to fight against the Germans and also to help the Slovaks do so. As she walked back to the camp, hand in hand with Keszthelyi, Maria was concerned about many things: her leg, painfully infected with frostbite; her photograph, placed by the Germans on a “wanted” poster and plastered all over the area; her growing attraction to Lieutenant Keszthelyi; and their uncertain future. But she was sure that she was doing the right thing by staying with the Americans, even when a few days later, Lieutenant Keszthelyi and another member of the Dawes team, Sergeant Jerry Mican, were captured by the Germans.
Keszthelyi and Mican had been ordered to deliver a note requesting the use of some horses to a local orthodox priest, who was personally known and approved by an American woman named Margaret Kockova. Kockova had been working with a British espionage team, also on the run from the Germans. Maria had a foreboding and begged Keszthelyi and Mican not to go, but they just laughed and told her they’d see her soon.
When they didn’t return and she discovered that they had been betrayed to the Germans, Maria stormed to the priest’s home, risking her own betrayal and arrest, demanding to know what had happened. At first the priest denied that any Americans had been there at all, but Maria demanded to know the truth. The priest and his wife finally admitted that their female servant had betrayed the Americans.
There was nothing to do but continue on, especially because Maria and the team knew that now the Germans would be redoubling their efforts to find the rest of them. They decided to bypass the villages and instead make their way to a lodge where the British team, including Margaret Kockova, was waiting for them. They celebrated Christmas together there, but their festivities were short lived. The women’s personalities clashed, and Maria couldn’t bear to be under the same roof with Kockova, who had been instrumental—even if it had been unintentional—in the betrayal and arrest of Keszthelyi and Mican. Maria requested to be transferred to the hotel at the top of the mountain to cook and clean for the men who were on guard there.
The next morning, Maria and the men leaving with her turned around to see that the lodge they had left just hours before was suddenly surrounded by German soldiers. Through their binoculars they could see the British and American teams being led out of the lodge and forced onto trucks while the lodge was burned to the ground.
Maria, two Americans, and two British now walked desperately, for many weeks, toward the Soviet army lines. Their limbs became frostbitten, their clothes tattered, and they became very weak. Maria had to be carried to their final hiding place, a deserted mine shaft. It was while huddled in this mine shaft that Maria and her companions heard the good news: Soviet forces had captured a nearby town! They would finally be safe from the Germans!
But their joy was short lived. The Soviets did not trust the Americans or the British. They interrogated Maria more than the others since she was the only one in the group who spoke Russian. What had the Americans been doing in Slovakia? Why was she traveling with them? Why didn’t she admit to being a spy for the Americans? Maria didn’t tell them that one key aspect of the Dawes mission was to gather information on Soviet activity in Slovakia. She repeated, again and again, that the Americans had been in Slovakia to help the CFI and to wage sabotage warfare against the Germans, their common enemy. They didn’t believe her and grew increasingly hostile, at last forcing her to sign a paper stating that she would now work for the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Police, for an unspecified amount of time. Maria had no choice but to sign.
When the others were ordered to be shipped to another location, Maria was told that since she was now employed by the NKVD, she would have to remain behind. She was able to escape this fate by pretending to be married to one of the men, Guilliam Davis, a British sergeant who had been protective of Maria since he had joined the retreating Dawes team.
The Soviets consented, with the stipulation that Maria would return later to fulfill her duties with the NKVD. They were all put on a train going to Odessa. When they learned that their train was going to stop in Bucharest, Romania, where there was an American army post, they devised a desperate plan.
When the train stopped in Bucharest, Maria and two other women (whom she had befriended just before boarding the train) begged their Soviet guard for permission to visit the station lavatory while one of the Americans—Sergeant Steven Catlos—snuck off the train and made a phone call to the local American army post. He was told he must stay off the train and stall for 20 minutes until some U.S. soldiers could get there. Maria and the women kept making groaning sounds from inside the lavatory, pretending to be sick, much to the dismay of their nervous Soviet guard, who kept pounding on the door. When they heard the prearranged signal—Sergeant Catlos whistling “Yankee Doodle”—Maria cracked open the door and saw a welcome sight: a group of U.S. soldiers storming the station. The Soviets insisted that the refugees get back on the train, and the leader of the U.S. soldiers insisted that they go free. The outnumbered Soviets finally relented, and Maria and the others were free.
Maria was in Italy, working at the OSS headquarter there, when she received some dreadful news: the captured members of the Dawes team, including Maria’s friend Tibor Keszthelyi, had all been tortured and killed by the Germans.
For her work in assisting the Dawes team escape the Germans, Maria Gulovich was awarded the Bronze Star medal in a ceremony at West Point Military Academy, where General William Donovan, the head of the OSS, pinned the medal on Maria’s dress with these words: “The dangers you courageously braved and terrible hardships endured bespeak an ardent spirit devoted to freedom and justice. Your cool and determined behavior under enemy fire is matched by skill in negotiating for sustenance in enemy infested areas. I commend you for your exemplary heroism in serving the Dawes mission and the United States of America.”
Maria was given a scholarship to Vassar College and became a U.S. citizen in 1952. She died in California in September 2009.