William Penn Life, 2010 (45. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2010-06-01 / 6. szám
Hungary’s Peaceful Revolution Cutting the fence and changing history IN SPRING 1989, Hungary began dismantling its fortified border with Austria. A few months later, the first crack in the Iron Curtain opened when hundreds of East Germans fled across the Austrian-Hungarian border. Now new details about the quiet heroes of that historic event are coming to light. When the Iron Curtain was torn open for the first time, on June 27, 1989, an image made its way around the world. It showed two men dressed in suits, using bolt cutters to nip holes in a barbed wire fence. The men, then-Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock and his Hungarian counterpart Gyula Horn, had traveled to the Austrian-Hungarian border that day to send a signal that the division of postwar Europe was coming to an end. Shoulder-to-shoulder, wielding the bulky bolt cutters against the wire fence, they seemed to be conveying the good news that the fence was finally coming down. In reality, as then-Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh says today, speaking in a coffee shop close to his home on the north shore of Lake Balaton, the removal of the border fence had already been underway for several weeks at the time. When Foreign Minister Horn proposed the fence-cutting ceremony along the border, Németh replied: “Gyula, do it, but hurry up—there isn't much barbed wire left." by Walter Mayr Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan Barbed Wire (c) Vladimir Wrangel/Dreamstime.com \ Waving Flag of Hungary (c) Gyuszko/Dreamstime.Com
