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  Hungary's Peaceful Revolution: Cutting the Fence and Changing History

Hungary's Peaceful Revolution Cutting the Fence and Changing History

By Walter Mayr

Part 3: 'Keep Your Eyes Shut and Let Them Through'

A stone apparently became caught "in the chain of command," says Németh, referring to the top-secret operation. And then the former prime minister explains what the actual plan was for the picnic.

According to Németh, a general from the Interior Ministry had been chosen to give the following instructions -- discretely, but nevertheless on behalf of the Hungarian government -- to the border guards' high command: "If, during the course of the picnic, a few hundred Germans managed to get across the border, we would have no objection." For the officers this meant, in the language of politicians: Keep your eyes shut and let them through.

According to Pozsgay, a former member of the Hungarian politburo, a small group of senior government officials agreed that the following approach would be taken: If possible, the Hungarian government was to come across as "an injured party, not as a participant" in the East German citizens' penetration of the border during the picnic. The government officials had entered into a conspiracy of sorts with the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service staff and church representatives to circulate the message.

But at the Hungarian Interior Ministry, what had been intended as an order was perceived as pseudo-intellectual babble -- and was ignored. Former Prime Minister Németh, without naming names, assumes that those responsible for ignoring the order belonged to circles whose members held internal security as more important than anything else. To this day, those people treat him as a "traitor to the international proletarian friendship."

Fortunately, Lieutenant Colonel Bella recognized "what history demanded of him," as Németh puts it. "Bella knew about as much as a rabbit knows about the objectives of a laboratory experiment," says Pozsgay. The "pilot project" that was intended as a test to determine whether the Soviet Union would tolerate a breach on the Warsaw Pact's western flank was carried out at the expense of five border guards and about 30 unsuspecting picnic organizers.

On Aug. 25, Németh and Foreign Minister Horn flew to Germany for a secret meeting with Chancellor Kohl and then German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. At Gymnich Palace near Cologne, the guesthouse for the German government at the time, the four men discussed how the East Germans still in Hungary could be brought to West Germany. The tone of the meeting was friendly but the mood was tense. "Everything must have been bugged at Gymnich," says Németh. "Even though there was only a Hungarian interpreter there, I later found all my statements reproduced verbatim in Chancellor Kohl's biography." The group eventually agreed to evacuate any East Germans who wanted to leave. But a date for the evacuation was not set.

Two-and-a-half weeks later, busses containing the East German refugees began the trip to the West. They crossed the border into Austria shortly after midnight on Sept. 11.

It was a day of joy -- for the refugees and, especially, for Chancellor Kohl. It was the eve of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) convention in Bremen, where a group led by Heiner Geissler and Rita Süssmuth had planned to stage a coup against party chief Kohl. Instead he would go to the convention armed with the news of a historic triumph. Kohl remained chairman of the party and was chancellor for another nine years.

Hungary's heroes of the crucial summer of 1989 reaped few rewards at home. Prime Minister Németh was denied promotion to the office of the president of the republic and spent the next nine years in London, where he served as vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He has no illusions when he contemplates the new Hungary today.

What he sees is a country that, once again, is practically bankrupt. He sees a deeply divided political landscape in which the once-united members of the opposition are practically at each other's throats. And he sees a prosperous clique in power, a group of which one of the 1989 picnic organizers says: "The people in power today are precisely those former leaders of the Communist youth organization who would have ended up in the same jobs even without the fall of Communism."

Reformer Pozsgay is at loggerheads with former cohorts over the question of who deserves the credit for the sweeping changes of 1989. Politically speaking, after taking a circuitous route, he has ended up in the company of right-wing populist Viktor Orbán. The former forward thinker sits in his house in a Budapest residential neighborhood surrounded by walls of books, and describes how in 1989 the Hungarians, more or less inadvertently, brought down Europe's postwar order. "It was a strong intention that took on a life of its own."

Father Kozma continues to minister to the poor and infirm in the Budapest suburb of Zugliget. If he is grieved over the fact that the Germans never paid for the memorial to the mass exodus in his garden, as they had promised, he doesn't show it. Kozma was not even honored at the Hungarian awards ceremony to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the fall of communism.

And Arpád Bella? He tends to his grape vines and cares for his sick mother, paying little heed to the idle gossip of former comrades who call him a traitor to this day. Occasionally, he drives across the border, where are no longer any reminders of the Iron Curtain, to pay a visit to Johann Göltl in the town of Apetlon, not far from the banks of Lake Neusiedl.

Then the two men, former guards on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, sit and drink white wine spritzers and talk about old and new times. They are fond of each other, and yet, says Johann, he still doesn't quite trust Arpád. Why? Because he is convinced that the business with the East German refugees back then at the wooden gate near Sopron was nothing but a disruptive maneuver carefully organized "by the communists over there."

"We've probably drunk 10 hectoliters of wine spritzers together," retired Lieutenant Colonel Bella groans, "and he still doesn't believe me: I had no idea."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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