By Walter Mayr
On Aug. 14, men and women from East Germany, the workers and peasants republic of atheist leader Honecker, were lying, shoulder-to-shoulder, on the floor of the Holy Family Roman Catholic Church in Budapest's Zugliget district. The words on the altar read: "All that is not God is nothing." Father Imre Kozma attended to their needs.
On Aug. 13, the anniversary of the Berlin Wall's construction, the German consul in Budapest approached Kozma to ask whether some of the East German citizens packed into the overcrowded grounds of the West German embassy could be moved to the church. The priest agreed.
Kozma got volunteers to erect tents and distribute food to the refugees. He even tolerated being checked by members of the BND, West Germany's foreign intelligence agency, at the entrance to the grounds of his own church. He also allowed officials from the West German embassy, who had quickly set up a "consular office" inside the church, to hand out green West German passports to the East German citizens.
Meanwhile, members of the East German secret police, the Stasi, stood on the roofs of nearby buildings and looked on helplessly, watching as Kozma, who had since February been president of the newly established Hungarian Malteser Caritas, the Order of Malta charity service in Hungary, took on the role of an essentially neutral middleman in the struggle between the two Germanys over the future of tens of thousands of East German citizens. Prime Minister Németh was already suspected of having closer ties to Bonn, the West German capital at the time, than to East Berlin. German Chancellor Kohl and his adviser Horst Teltschik held Németh, a 41-year-old economic expert, in high regard. Kohl was in touch with Németh by telephone, and Németh communicated with Father Kozma.
The tens of thousands of East Germans with expired residence permits in Hungary were refusing to return home, and a solution was desperately needed. On Aug. 17, rumors began to spread that there would be an opportunity to flee during the planned "Pan-European Picnic" near Sopron. Representatives of the West German embassy "knew about it, but acted as if the whole thing was of no concern to them," says Kozma today.
During the night between Aug. 18 and 19, shortly before the first East German-made Trabants and Wartburgs began moving toward the West, preparations went into high gear at the rectory of the Holy Family Church in Budapest-Zugliget. A German-language flyer had turned up, but no one -- supposedly -- knew where it had come from.
The flyer included an image of a stylized rose in barbed wire, driving directions to the picnic and, as a bonus, a map showing the location of the Austrian border, 2 kilometers north of the picnic site.
'I Don't Want to Be a Mass Murderer'
Past Sopronköhida, the site of Hungary's most notorious prison since the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the road leads uphill toward the border. Shortly before the barrier, on the left-hand side, there was a collective farm consisting of a group of houses and stables in a valley. There, in the plains near the town of Sopron, was the site of the Pan-European Picnic.
The organizers were members of various opposition parties that had been permitted in Hungary, a former one-party state, since February 1989. They were about to try something that would have been unthinkable until then: A three-hour opening of the border with Austria, which had been closed for the last 40 years. They had obtained the necessary permits and delegations from both sides had been invited for a barbed wire cutting ceremony. Food would be served and good neighborly relations between the two countries celebrated.
The sponsors of the event were Hungarian reformer Pozsgay and Otto von Habsburg, the son of the former Emperor of Austria, but both men declined to attend before the picnic even started. A "large number of East German citizens" were expected, according to a telegram from the border patrol agency's headquarters in Budapest, sent at 10 a.m. on the day before the picnic.
Lieutenant Colonel Arpád Bella, 43 years old and in charge of the border patrol near Sopron, had studied the telegram carefully, including a passage in which he was instructed only to use his six-shot, 9-millimeter service pistol if he or one of his men was attacked or was forced "with physical violence" to leave his post. At 2:55 p.m. on a sunny Saturday in August, Lieutenant Colonel Bella saw a crowd of people -- men, women and children -- walking uphill towards him.
Within seconds, says Bella, it became clear to him that this could not possibly be the delegation that had been registered to cross the border. And within seconds Bella realized that everything threatened to spin out of control. It was his wedding anniversary and the day before his 20th service anniversary, and he wanted to get home on time. But now they were bearing down on him, 100 or more people, pushing past him and forcing open the old wooden gate toward Austria.
Lieutenant Colonel Bella was a career officer, a man who had served the Hungarian People's Republic in exemplary fashion. In secret, however, as he says, he "did not believe that socialism was capable of making the Yenisei River flow in the opposite direction." With a family to feed, however, Bella was never one for rebelling or an advocate of "kamikaze actions."
But now he was standing there at the border, already overrun by the first wave of East German refugees and watching as the second one approached. He thought about his standard orders, which required him to fire a warning shot first, then release the guard dogs and then resort to more serious steps. It took him 10 seconds, says Bella today, to reach his decision: "I don't want to be a mass murderer." He issued the following orders to his team of four border guards: "Face Austria and check passports if anyone comes from that direction. We don't see what happens behind us."
On the Austrian side, Johann Göltl was soon surrounded by weeping, speechless East Germans. The head of the Klingenbach customs inspection office, Göltl had been Arpád Bella's counterpart on the border for two decades. The men knew each other well, even eating their meals in the same cafeteria. But now Göltl was beside himself. "Are you out of your mind," he shouted at the Hungarian officer. "We already discussed this, and then you send me 600 people out of a cornfield." Lieutenant Colonel Bella swore that he had known nothing about it.
By the evening of Aug. 19, more than 600 East Germans had crossed the border to Austria, in a mass exodus never before seen in Cold War-era Europe since the construction of the Berlin Wall. Lieutenant Colonel Bella is convinced that the very last people one should have thanked for the fact that not a single shot was fired and no one was killed were those in the Hungarian government. "Prime Minister Németh says today that an order was given at the time. But what happened to that order?" he asks.
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