William Penn Life, 2010 (45. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

2010-06-01 / 6. szám

There had been signs of Hungary's quiet departure from the camp of the Warsaw Pact states for years. But neither Hungary's allies nor the NATO countries took these signals seriously. Even in the summer of 1989, there still seemed to be too many factors standing in the way of a change in the postwar order. For one thing, Russian troops were still stationed in Hungary. The rest of the world was not truly convinced of the changes until August 19,1989, when hundreds of East Germans, more or less unobstructed, slipped into the West through a rickety wooden gate near Sopron. It was the beginning of the end of East Germany. Roughly three weeks later, more than 10,000 East German citizens traveled to West Germany through Austria — legally, by this time.

It was in Hungary where "the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall," then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reminded his fellow Germans when he spoke in Berlin on Oct. 4,1990, the day after German reunification. And Hungary is still home today to the secret facilitators and quiet heroes who probably gave the regime of East German leader Erich Honecker the decisive push by opening the gates to the West for tens of thousands of East German refugees.

The names of the communist reformers and civil rights activists, border patrol officers and pastors who

helped to write history in front of a barbed wire-topped wooden gate in the border region near Lake Neusiedl were soon on everyone's lips.

What inspired them to act, on the other hand, is only slowly coming to light now.

False Alarms Hungary's problems began 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the Austrian border. In the late 1980s, those attempting to flee the country could expect to face a barbed wire fence and a Soviet SZ-100 signaling system, which set off an alarm via 24-volt electricity cables. After decades of the Cold War, the signal wire had become rusty. In a complaint to the relevant cabinet minister, the head of the border patrols wrote: "We have to purchase the stainless steel wire needed to replace the current wire from the West, for hard currency." The Soviet Union was apparently no longer supplying the requisite material.

With their audible complaints, the Hungarian border patrol officers were the ones who got the ball rolling at the time, writes historian Andreas Oplatka in his wellinformed book, "Der erste Riss in der Mauer" ("The First Crack in the Wall"). In their reports, the officers wrote that rabbits, birds and the occasional drunk were setting off false alarms at the border close to 4,000 times a year.

When the Iron Curtain was torn open for the first time on June 21, 1989, an image made its way around the world. It showed Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn (right) and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock using bolt cutters to nip holes in a barbed wire fence. (Photo (c) epa/Corbis

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