Since Slovakia was right next to Austria and the Reich (give that a thought next time you complain about your neighbor's cinder-block El Camino), Allied planes would frequently buzz over the Slovak countryside on their way back to safe territory. And since the German pilots were skilled fliers as well as huge jerkwads, many Allied planes ended up being shot down on the Czech-Slovak border. It was literally raining men. Luckily for any airman who wasn't immediately caught, the local Underground had a series of safehouses set up to get them out from behind enemy lines.

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The first stop for many of these airmen was a small Slovak town on the Vah River near the present-day Czech Republic in the Carpathian Mountains, which are significantly less full of vampires and Vigos than the movies would have you believe. And during the first half of the 1940s, the leader of that town's Underground was Stefan Urbanek, who worked with his teenage daughter Katarina. Here it is in her words ...

Several people lived in the mountains outside the town. Mountain people, like what you would find in West Virginia, who would bring in berries and mushrooms to trade. Every so often they would come to us, saying, "Over there somebody is hiding." So my dad went out there at night. He spoke several languages, including perfect English and the gypsy language [Roma]. The people hiding there turned out to be American airmen shot down.