The Year that Changed the World Page 13

  Then came the master stroke. As the day of the picnic approached, flyers similar to those distributed by the official organizers—but coming from a different source—appeared in the camps where East German vacationers were staying. They were plastered on walls and in hotels, wherever East Germans would see them. Priests holding religious services in the camps helped spread the word; camp managers passed out leaflets. Come one, come all, to the Pan-European Picnic. Eat, drink and be merry. Snip a piece of the Iron Curtain as a souvenir. But be careful not to stray. The border is unguarded. Why, you might stumble into Austria and no one would notice! Handy maps were disseminated that provided directions on how to find one’s way on the Austrian side of the border. So as not to “stray,” of course!

  Nemeth, Pozsgay and their allies had been attempting to lure East Germans to cross the Hungarian border for months, ever since May 2. They even staged a replay of that telegenic moment, on June 27, when the foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary, Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, met at the border and ceremoniously picked up outsize wire cutters and began snipping at the fence. Never mind that much of it had already been removed. With laughs and handshakes, they handed out bits and pieces as souvenirs for the journalists summoned to witness the occasion. Nemeth later told me he wanted to make sure the world got the message. “Something important is happening,” he sought to say. “Pay attention.”

  The Hungarians thought the message was clear. But East Germans still didn’t seem to get it. The Pan-European Picnic hence became what an American football quarterback might call a Hail Mary—an all-or-nothing throw downfield, aiming for a touchdown. For the Hungarian conspirators, this translated, essentially, into a plan to lure a bunch of East Germans out of the country, over the border to freedom, in hopes that thousands of others would follow. Nemeth called it “priming the pump.”

  Pozsgay organized the operation as secretly and discreetly as possible. Honecker had been increasingly insistent that any East Germans caught trying to cross the border illegally be returned for prosecution. East German secret police had been making themselves ostentatiously visible in the camps around Lake Balaton and the border regions, urging GDR citizens to return home and warning of the penalties of escape, not only for themselves but for their families left behind. Neither Pozsgay nor Nemeth knew whom to trust. Authorities reporting to allies such as Interior Minister Istvan Horvath could most likely be counted on. But in addition to the border police there were armed members of the so-called Workers’ Guard, a paramilitary organ of the communist party controlled by conservatives under Karoly Grosz. In a subsequent BBC/Spiegel TV documentary, Pozsgay would describe the picnic as a “nerve-racking operation,” all the more so because it was organized in cahoots with the West German government.

  The day of the event, August 19, arrived. In effect, it was two events—the one very public, and the other private. Once combined, their effect was explosive. The official program began around 2 p.m. in Sopron, with a press conference in German, English and Hungarian. Buses then took the delegates and their foreign visitors, including a small army of reporters, to the picnic site. The organizers were aghast. They could barely get near the picnic area. They expected only several hundred people. Ten or twenty times that many showed up. People were everywhere. “A mass of Austrian guests, invited and not invited, had come across the border, rushing through the cornfields, making it impossible for anyone to move about,” one of them recalled. “It was impossible to control such a crowd. No one was expecting anything like this. It was absolute chaos.”

  This was the private “party.” When the buses arranged by Pozsgay’s people arrived at Sopron’s overflowing hotels and campsites outside town, East Germans clamored to get on. Hungarian and West German consular officers escorted them to the picnic site. Many of the East Germans had already been given Federal Republic passports, issued by the consulate in Budapest and stamped with the exit and entry visas required to leave Hungary and enter the Federal Republic via Austria. But many, freshly arrived, had nothing. Others drove themselves. On the other side of the border, the Austrians had set up Red Cross tents, clearly notified to expect a deluge. A fleet of buses stood idling nearby, organized by the mayor of the nearby Austrian town, St. Margarethen, at the behest of the West German government. It was arranged that any East Germans who crossed the border would be transported to Giessen, in central West Germany, that very day.

  Imagine the scene. Four hundred miles from the Berlin Wall, the Pan-European Picnic began. A brass band played. Folk dancers in traditional Hungarian and Tyrolean garb cavorted in the meadows. There were banners and balloons and beer and good things to eat. Bewildered families of East Germans were set loose upon this surreal stage set, clutching their maps and turning nervously this way and that, trying to get their bearings. No frontier police were visible; Gyula Kovacs had ordered them to keep a distance of one kilometer. Instead, senior Hungarian and Austrian diplomats wandered among the crowd, nodding amiably as if this were merely what it appeared to be—a festive party in a field, where neither borders nor the Wall nor the Iron Curtain meant anything.

  A bit before 3 p.m., this untenable facade cracked open, according to Laszlo Nagy, a local activist who helped put the event together. A group of some three hundred East Germans disembarked from their buses. Ignoring the festivities, they made straight for the border gate, opened wide for the first time in four decades. As one of the organizers moved to welcome them, they burst into a run. “They rushed through,” Nagy recalled, “with the speed of a fast train.” Not that there was anyone to stop them. The few Hungarian border officials stood with their backs turned ostentatiously to the East Germans, obsessively checking the passports of incoming and outgoing Austrians, who laughed aloud at the spectacle and moved to form a line on one side of the crossing so that the charging East Germans could exit on the other.

  More were to follow. All afternoon they kept coming, in groups, singly or by family—“a constant stream,” as Nagy described it. As if in willful neglect of the rules the organizers themselves had laid down, the Hungarian border officials seemed blind to the exodus, continuing to concern themselves only with Austrians despite occasionally being so jostled by the passing East Germans as to almost be knocked down.

  Amid this maelstrom of calculated human confusion came moments of true absurdity. The family of one Silvia Lux, who braved the crossing with her husband and children, told of getting lost. Dozens of East Germans had “strayed” ahead of them, but they could not find the way. Suddenly, a man they identified as being from the West German consulate popped up from behind a bush. “Family Lux,” he shouted, consulting a list of names in his hand. “Not that way. This way! Some nice border guards will open the gate for you!” And so, as she told Western TV reporters, they did. “It was all very well planned,” she added, relating how West German officials had taken them via taxi from Budapest to Sopron, installed them in a hotel with instructions to “stay out of sight,” then driven them the next day directly to the picnic site.

  Back in Budapest, Nemeth and his men heaved a collective sigh of relief. They had spent all afternoon huddled in his office, equipped with special communications links for the occasion, monitoring the situation moment by moment. As for the real guests, they busied themselves with the beer and the wine, the food and the sheer entertainment of the show going on about them. It would have gone on all night, save for an evening thunderstorm. As Laszlo Nagy got into his car to head home, he was struck by the number of abandoned Trabants and Wartburgs, all with GDR license plates, lining the sides of the roads. “Their owners would not return for them.”

  That night, Hungarian state TV showed a brief clip of the festival but made no mention of the more than six hundred East Germans who had “escaped” across the border that day. Soon, however, members of the communist party brownshirts, the Workers’ Guard, would begin directing cars with East German license plates away from the Austrian border. Shots could be heard at night; most were suspected o
f being fired by frontier guards, units loyal to the party, or by the Workers’ Guard, intended to frighten away anyone trying to cross the border under cover of darkness. On August 21, a young East German named Kurt-Werner Schultz, trying to cross with his wife and six-year-old son, was shot and killed in a scuffle. It was unclear who was responsible, or who had ordered the border crackdown. In any case, Erich Honecker, who witnessed coverage of the Pan-European Picnic on West German television, protested strenuously to the Hungarian ambassador in East Berlin and demanded that East German citizens be forcibly returned to the GDR.

  In certain respects, the Pan-European Picnic was a disappointment. Nemeth had hoped that as many as ten thousand East Germans would leave that day, setting a mass exodus in motion. That so few East Germans seized the opportunity showed just how afraid they were. Some feared the Pan-European Picnic was a trap, as the Stasi secret police in the camps were claiming. Nemeth did not actually know how Moscow would react to a mass exodus. He had gone to great lengths to conceal Bonn’s role in the planning. West German officials revealed themselves only at the last moment, and arrangements were negotiated in the greatest secrecy. Now everyone sat back to wait. “This was the Big Bang, the real test of Moscow’s tolerance,” Nemeth told me a decade later. “Will we get a bang on the door from the Russians? If something went wrong, or if Moscow protested, then we would have learned something. But nothing happened.”

  Several days passed, and Nemeth concluded it was safe to go further. On August 22, his top advisers met to consider their next move. The vacation season was ending. Soon, the weather would turn cold. Several hundred refugees were now leaving Hungary each day. But 150,000 East Germans remained. The situation had to be resolved. “We discussed several options,” Nemeth recalled. “Someone suggested spreading rumors that the refugee camps would be dismantled in the night, and that anyone there would be sent home. Another was to tell people that unguarded trains were waiting at the border, ready to take them to Austria.” The point was to frighten the East Germans into trying to “escape.” In the end, Nemeth decided he did not like the pretense. “I thought it better to just open the border. Which is what we decided to do.”

  Three days later Nemeth and Gyula Horn flew secretly to Bonn to brief Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Genscher emerged from the hospital, where he was recovering from a heart attack, just for this meeting. “It was just the four of us in a room, without aides,” Nemeth recalled. He began by telling them, tongue in cheek, that East Germans visiting Hungary in the future would soon find it far easier to leave. Hungary would go its own way, he informed them. It would break with the Warsaw Pact and allow citizens of the GDR to freely emigrate. It would officially and fully open its borders, as soon as the Federal Republic was prepared to receive the exodus. “Rarely had I been so filled with anticipation before a meeting,” wrote Genscher in his memoir, Rebuilding a House Divided. Kohl was profuse in his gratitude. “He asked me two or three times, ‘What would you like in return?’ ” said Nemeth, discussing reports that Hungary was given a 500-million-deutsche-mark federal loan (roughly $250 million) in recognition of its services. “We really needed this money. Everything was ready to be signed. But I asked them to delay. We did not do this for the money, and I did not want to be accused of taking bribes.”

  Nemeth and his reformers would not make their announcement for another two weeks. Clearly, they did not fully realize just how decisive it would prove to be. Flying back from Bonn, Horn had speculated on the history of the moment. Who knows? he told Nemeth. Perhaps in three or four years, it could produce a real change in Hungary’s relations with the West.

  It would turn out to take just two months. Four hundred miles from the Berlin Wall, the Pan-European Picnic, with its folk dancers and brass band, had set in motion developments that would build with such incredible speed and force as to bring down Erich Honecker and topple his Berlin Wall.

  Directly to the east of Hungary, now boiling with change, was Ceausescu’s Romania. How to describe it? By metaphor, it would be Dante’s Ninth Circle, the ring of frozen stillness closest to the Darkness. That was the first thing you noticed, the stillness. It wasn’t an absence of sound but rather an almost existential mutedness, as if nothing were quite real.

  Nicolae Ceausescu, Europe’s Last Stalinist, bestrode his unfortunate country like some oddly frail colossus. He began as a shoemaker, rising in 1965 to become chief of Romania’s communist party, famous as a maverick East European leader who dared to defy Moscow. His independence from Soviet influence was conspicuously demonstrated by his refusal to participate in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ceausescu maintained relations with Israel after the 1967 war, unlike the rest of the East bloc, and in reward received a succession of world leaders, from Richard Nixon to Queen Elizabeth to Jordan’s King Hussein. Romanians enjoyed a measure of free speech unmatched elsewhere in the communist world. During the 1970s foreign newspapers and books were on sale. Radio broadcasts were not jammed. People could talk freely with foreigners. The secret police stayed in the shadows.

  But that was then. By 1989, at seventy-one, Ceausescu had grown old. No longer celebrated as a maverick, he was instead reviled as a tyrant. When world leaders stopped alighting in Bucharest, the flattery to feed the dictator’s ego had to be homegrown. Romania’s once flourishing intelligentsia became courtiers. Poets penned verses to Ceausescu, or at least those who got published. Books and magazines and television carried ritual incantations of praise for the Enlightened One. His speeches, two to three hours in duration, were aired on loudspeakers throughout the country, live, from the beaches of the Black Sea to the parks of Bucharest and every small-town square. Foreign journals and books were banned. Contact with outsiders was forbidden. Typewriters had to be registered with the police, along with copies of their typeface. Movies were throwbacks to the fifties and sixties—Jimmy Stewart westerns and Italian farces with Sophia Loren. The emperor’s secret police, the vicious Securitate, were everywhere. Criticism of Ceausescu or his regime was quickly and brutally punished. Torture or a beating could be expected by anyone unfortunate enough to be arrested. “There is no forward here,” an American diplomat told me. “Only variations on backward.”

  Early in August, as Hungary’s closet revolutionaries prepared their Pan-European Picnic, I paid a first visit to Romania. I wondered if I would find any sign of change, a hint of the revolution happening elsewhere in the bloc. Perhaps a dozen passengers arrived aboard the flight from Vienna. We shuffled through the empty terminal, footsteps echoing. No one was to be seen at Arrivals or Departures, save men with guns and walkie-talkies. A policeman stood at every door. They paced the tarmac near our plane. They walked the runways in the distance or sat in little huts like duck-shot blinds, their guns poking out. The massive parking lot outside was also empty but for a few taxis. The drivers, in broken shoes and soiled clothes, pushed their vehicles forward through the queue to save fuel.

  Bucharest was a ghost town with people. They trudged to and from work, lived cowed and furtive lives. A bus would pass. You could sense everyone looking at you, but when you glanced up, they turned away. Passersby would look at your shoes, however, especially Western athletic shoes—a privilege of the top communist elite. It was a habit I would pick up. The plainclothes police who followed me liked to wear white sneakers.

  Every day I tried to shake them. Usually I would find a crowded place to stroll, then jump in a taxi. If the driver spoke English, I’d pay him an extravagant sum—say $10, nearly a month’s wage—to just drive around and talk. One told me a common joke: “If only we had a little more food, it would be just like wartime!” Things had gotten so bad, he said, that it was almost impossible to live. Every day after work, he rushed to the market to see if there was anything to buy. It wasn’t uncommon to wait three, four, eight hours in line each day. Often, grandparents would go out at 1 a.m. or so and wait on little stools outside the shop doors, hoping they might open sometime that day
. If a queue formed, people joined it immediately, buying whatever was sold: soap, meat, cooking oil, tampons, toilet paper, milk—anything and everything was in short supply. “All day I worry, and at night I lie awake,” my driver went on. “How to find enough food. How to get medicine for my children. Or shoes. Will there be electricity tonight? Or heat?”

  We drove by the huge palace Ceausescu was constructing at the center of Bucharest, larger than any other on earth, a thousand rooms made entirely of white marble and costing an entire year’s worth of the country’s exports. “We call it the Big Building,” the driver said, as we skirted its several-mile circumference. “He is mad, Ceausescu. Every Romanian thinks as I do. But if I went into the street and said, ‘This is bad,’ the police would come for me like that.” He snapped his fingers. “For my family, even, I would no longer exist. I would be lost in space.” Half amused, half despairingly, he laughed and said, “There will never be a revolution in Romania.”

  He dropped me off at the edge of a park where there were no other cars or people so I could see whether I’d been followed. I sat down on a bench and after a time was joined by a man who described himself as a welder. “You cannot conceive how we live, how poor we have become,” he said after we began to speak, glancing about to see who might observe him chatting with a dangerous foreigner. It was a sunny day, and we watched children playing on a carousel that gave out every twenty minutes for lack of electricity. He complained that authorities not long ago canceled a two-hour radio program of music, jokes and entertainment as “inappropriate.” “The joys of life are few,” this man concluded resentfully. “We no longer even have the right to laugh. We get one hour of radio each evening, and two hours of television. There is no news; only pictures of Him.”