FOIAWEAR — MARIA GULOVICH / The Indomitable Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 023

A 23-year-old Slovak schoolteacher who walked a small group of spies out of the mountains in a blizzard while the Gestapo hunted them.

When Slovakia fell under German control, Maria Gulovich — a Greek-Catholic priest's daughter, fluent in five languages — hid a Jewish woman and her son from the Nazis, then joined the underground as a courier. Her first mission was a suitcase she would not learn until 1989 contained a radio. On the return trip she flirted her way past the Gestapo. Recruited into the OSS DAWES mission as guide and interpreter, she posed as a peasant girl to scout food and intelligence through German-patrolled towns.

In November 1944 a blizzard struck the Slovak mountains — wind that knocked people off their feet, and 83 souls who stopped to rest froze to death. Days later the Germans burned the team's hunting lodge on Mount Dumbier and captured the men who stayed behind. Maria and a handful of survivors walked for nine weeks through the bitter cold, sleeping in barns and mines, suffering frostbite and lice, until they reached Bucharest and safety.

The men she saved remembered her as "our little sweetheart … to her I owe my safety and perhaps my life." In May 1946, on the Plain of West Point, William "Wild Bill" Donovan pinned on her the Bronze Star — the first woman so honored before the Corps of Cadets.

The artwork is a stylised tribute — the mountain trail, the falling snow, and the small figure with the lantern leading the way. It is not a portrait.

This shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the mountains in icy teal on Black, Navy and Graphite, and in a matching dark-ink print on Chambray, Grey and White.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA's article on Maria Gulovich, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-indomitable-maria-gulovich/

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

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