It was a story that Barbara Masin heard countless times when growing up, always begging her father, Josef Mašín, to tell it one last time before bed.

In 1953, three young Czech men, members of the Mašín brothers anti-communist resistance group, successfully fought their way through the Iron Curtain while being pursued by thousands of East German police officers. Barbara's father Josef was one of those men, and she was both titillated and frightened as she listened to how the escapees hid out for weeks in the former East Germany, determined to make their way to West Berlin or die trying.

It's been called the greatest story of the Cold War. But as she grew older, Barbara found many aspects of it puzzling. Why, for instance, would the communist regime find a group of young boys so threatening that it would mobilize some 24,000 police officers and Soviet soldiers in an attempt to hunt them down?

"I especially wanted to retell the story from all the points of view, not just from my father's perspective, which I knew so well already," says Barbara via phone from California, where she currently lives. "What was the West thinking about all of this? What were the East Germans thinking? I wanted to get to the bottom of these questions."

She taught herself Czech and spent four years scouring Czech, East German and U.S. archives — the Russian archives proved impenetrable, bound in layers of red tape — reading Cold War documents and interviewing friends and relatives of her family. The result is Gauntlet, being released this week by Naval Institute Press.

Still controversial

For Czechs, the Mašín brothers group, which included Josef's older brother Ctirad and their friends Milan Paumer, Zbyněk Janata and Václav Švéda, continues to be a source of great controversy. The resistance activities that culminated in their escape included stealing weapons, hijacking cars and killing six people. To some Czechs they are heroes, among the few who actively tried to fight the regime in the oppressive 1950s. Others, especially ex-communists, continue to see them as murderers.

Rather than trying to moralize, Barbara wanted the story to speak for itself.

"Some people just say, 'Oh, they killed people. They must be murderers,' " she says. "What they often don't do is place their actions in the appropriate context. There was a war going on."

From its first chapter, which introduces the escapees cold and hungry, hiding in piles of wood in an East German forest surrounded by the police, Gauntlet reads like a thriller, and that is just what Barbara intended. "It's very novel-like," she says. "For Czechs, this is a family saga, intertwined with some of the key moments of Czech history. For Americans, it will be above all a story about the quest for freedom."

Throughout the book, Barbara steps back often from the narrative to provide historical context. The Mašíns were an integral part of Czech history well before the 1948 communist coup. Her grandfather, the late Gen. Josef Mašín, was a World War II resistance leader who was executed by the Nazis in 1942. As Barbara tries to show, his example made an indelible impact on the young Josef and Ctirad when they were growing up.

Five against 24,000

Over the course of one month beginning in early October 1953, the two Mašín brothers and three of their friends traveled some 180 kilometers (112 miles) on foot, pursued by 24,000 armed men. The massive manhunt was due in part to Czech communist fears that the five young men were part of a bigger plot to break across the border and overthrow the regime.

The truth was that the escapees had just one goal: to reach West Berlin and join the U.S. Army.

"At the time, everyone thought that the Americans would invade any minute and overthrow the communist regime," recalls Josef today. "We wanted to be part of that."

In the end, only three of the group made it. Janata and Švéda were caught by the police and returned to Czechoslovakia, where they were executed in 1955.

The Mašín brothers and Paumer made it to the United States, where they joined the Army as they intended. But no U.S. invasion came, and the Mašín family members left behind were imprisoned by communist authorities. Eventually, Josef and Ctirad lost hope that they would ever return to their native country.

In fact, neither of the two has been back since their 1953 escape, disillusioned with how little has changed even after the 1989 revolution. Paumer returned in 2001 and now lives in his native Poděbrady.

"There are still communists in the government," says Josef, speaking from his home in California. "It's the same party that sentenced my mother to 25 years in prison."

Neither he nor his brother plans on returning to the Czech Republic anytime soon, if ever. If they were to return, the welcome they'd receive would probably be very ambiguous. Following the Mašíns' escape, the communists vilified the brothers, portraying them as cold-blooded murderers. And Josef says it's likely many people are still affected by this propaganda.

The Mašín brothers were nominated several times for the Order of the White Lion by the president of the Czech Republic but never actually received it. The Mašíns, it seems, remain too controversial for politics.