by Susan Viets
In the morning Ute called the border runner. She had considered telephoning before but didn’t want to. Now she felt desperate. As they spoke and planned an escape, Ute lost confidence and trust in this man, abandoned the plan, and returned regularly, instead, to the West German embassy. East Germans in a similar situation congregated there. One day Ute came home with Agnes, an East German student. I thought of Agnes as a substitute Helga, a friend of Ute’s who spoke English, though Agnes, like Ute, lived the nightmare of trying to escape. Zsolt and I were mere witnesses to this predicament.
I could pick Agnes out in any crowd by her mass of frizzy hair that stuck up on end. Bold by nature, she had already tried to cross the Austro-Hungarian border three times. On her last attempt she tripped a wire one and a half kilometres from no man’s land. Border guards with dogs came after her. One guard fired a shot in the air. Such warnings were allowed, but shooting anyone trying to cross was not. Agnes might have escaped if she’d run but she was so scared, she stopped. The guards warned her against making another attempt. They said twice as many patrols would soon reinforce the border. The guards drove Agnes back to Budapest. Like Ute, she did not know what to do.
The West German and Hungarian governments began refugee crisis discussions. In mid-August, the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service opened a refugee camp in Budapest. Finally someone stepped in to take charge.
A few days after the camp opened, Ute, Agnes and I sat in the living room and discussed options. Ute said, “The camp is quite good.” I had not visited the site.
Agnes said, “Many people have already moved in. Perhaps we will go.”
I watched as Ute gathered her belongings. She folded and then rolled her clothes in compact bundles that she tucked in her knapsack. The shower curtain rack, draped these past weeks with damp laundered T-shirts and underwear, now lay bare. Her sleeping bag, now as familiar to me as my bedspread, hung in a tight roll strapped to the bottom of her bag. Ute checked documents, clutched her passport, hoisted that heavy pack on her back. Then Ute, Agnes and I walked down the stairs.
“I’ll visit you,” I said.
“We are thanking you so much for your hospitality,” Ute replied. Then they stepped across the threshold, into the street. I felt as if I had thrown helpless refugees out the door. I woke the next morning worried about Ute and Agnes. I needed to know they’d be okay, so I went to the camp.
It was situated on spacious grounds surrounded by a wrought-iron fence in an attractive residential neighbourhood. Tents stood everywhere. Refugees sat scattered among the flowerbeds. Some lay on towels with backpacks at their feet. Others stretched out on the grass. Portable latrines and small cabins dotted the landscape.
I broke the rules by entering the camp, but no one noticed as I still looked like a student. I met some families with children. Most of the refugees were young and single, like Ute and Agnes. Money was tight for many, but at least they now had free accommodation and food. Still, everyone seemed understandably stressed as they found themselves stuck in limbo. They worried about the repercussions for relatives in East Germany because of their decision to leave, and they remained desperate for a way out of Hungary to West Germany.
A few days after Ute and Agnes arrived at the camp I received a faxed notice about a pan-European picnic organized by a descendant of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Otto von Habsburg, and a Hungarian opposition group, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). The picnic would be held a few days later at the Austro-Hungarian border, near Sopron. I phoned for more information. Organizers planned to temporarily open a rural border post, closed for years, for a pan-European friendship meeting between neighbouring villagers on opposite sides of the border. Dignitaries and journalists from the Hungarian side would travel to the Austrian side in a bus through the border post for celebrations in Austria.
What an opportunity. I immediately went to the camp, found Ute and Agnes and discussed a picnic plan. The site was an area near the breached Iron Curtain. They had given up on escape but that now seemed a possibility again.
Early in the morning on the day of the picnic I went to the car rental agency. The agent handed over keys for a rickety-looking Lada, the gear shift loose. I wondered whether we would break down along the way. Then I picked up Ute, Agnes and Zsolt. The picnic was not scheduled until later in the afternoon. We arranged to arrive early, ahead of the organizers. We needed time to explore the back roads near the site where we hoped to find a remote, patrol-free crossing where the Iron Curtain used to be.
We followed the directions sent by the picnic organizers. We found ourselves in a field near the border but did not know where the border actually lay. No signs marked anything. We stood, surrounded by fields bisected here and there by dusty country lanes. As we explored further, hoping to find a sign post, we noticed occasional cars parked haphazardly along the roads or in fields, all of the cars, two-stroke engine East German Trabants. Eventually we found an abandoned guard tower. A cluster of people stood nearby. They spoke German. Ute, Agnes and Zsolt chatted with them.
“They’re looking for the border,” Zsolt told me.
“Maybe we’ll see it from the top,” I replied, pointing at the guard tower. Zsolt and I climbed the tower. From the top we spied people in small groups. East Germans, we thought. They wandered up and down lanes for miles around. We could also now see dozens and dozens of parked cars scattered through fields.
Hours passed. No one that we met had found a route to Austria. Now early afternoon, Zsolt and I went to register for the picnic and the bus ride over the border. I pulled out my press accreditation. The woman at the registration table looked at it.
“The Guardian – a wonderful paper,” she said. She asked how long I’d been in Hungary and had a few other questions. Then she handed me a flimsy square of paper stamped with the word sajto, which means “press.”
“Will they check passports at the border?” I asked.
“No, this is all you need,” she said and pointed at the stamped paper. “No other documentation is required for the trip.”
I stepped away from the table. My heart thumped. My throat was dry. I knew that I needed to take two of those passes for Ute and Agnes.
I stood in the grass near the table and watched as another person registered. The woman in charge seemed distracted, but I could not bring myself to take the passes. Minutes ticked away. Then someone else registered. The third time I moved forward. The press passes stood stacked in a pile near the edge of the table. While the woman dealt with someone else, I took two and walked away. I felt sure that someone would notice, chase after me and take them back. No one did. I showed Zsolt the passes. He broke out in a grin.
We found Ute and Agnes and gave them the papers. They seemed happy, though guarded. I think they had already experienced too many setbacks to feel hopeful. We asked them to follow us onto the bus but not say anything. German chatter might attract suspicion. We boarded early. More people arrived. I watched anxiously as the bus filled, worried that there would not be enough room and that the organizers would realize more people sat in seats than had actually registered. After about half an hour no one else had boarded and several seats were still empty. The driver closed the door. The bus lurched down a narrow lane toward the border.
Within minutes it stopped. Zsolt and I sat near the back. From our window we could only see fields. We did not know what caused the delay. Ute and Agnes sat a little farther ahead. The driver opened the door and got out. Everyone followed. We saw that abandoned Trabants blocked the lane. Ute and Agnes had good instincts. They walked down the road. Then they started to run. We saw them pass a metal barrier that we thought must be the border. Other people ran. Ute and Agnes disappeared. A pack of East Germans raced down the road. Then everyone was gone. After all these weeks, Ute and Agnes had finally escaped. Zsolt and I stopped. We snapped celebratory shots at the metal barrier with my last frames of film. I felt a pang of regret as I realized that I had no pictures of Ute and Agnes. I had
taken them for granted and thought they’d always be there. The end had come so suddenly.
Then Zsolt chatted with a Hungarian man who stood nearby. The man told us the border crossing lay farther up the road. We grabbed our bags and ran. Soon we saw one overwhelmed border guard. People cut through fields and bolted behind him. Others who were bolder, ran in front, beyond arm’s reach. The guard did not stop anyone. I even thought that I saw him smile. It was a human stampede. Later I found out that more than 600 East Germans had raced by foot into Austria. Ute and Agnes long gone, I wished them the best in my heart and then crossed into Austria to interview as many people as I could find.
I stood on the dirt road, the dry earth disturbed by so many trampling feet. The air smelled musty. The sun illuminated floating specks of dust. Brown grass, desiccated by the summer sun, rustled in the breeze.
During one interview, I sensed that someone was staring at me from behind. At first I ignored this sensation. Then I turned. Agnes and Ute stood on the road waiting for me. I stopped the interview and ran over, yelled for Zsolt to join us.
“We wanted to come back to say goodbye,” Agnes said. “There is a tent up the road with food and some people who help us. They’ll find Ute’s uncle.”
My throat tightened. I could not believe that we stood together in Austria, Ute and Agnes finally safe. Not wanting to linger, they soon walked back up the road, farther into Austria. Zsolt and I turned in the opposite direction, crossed back into Hungary and drove to Budapest.
East German refugees flooded into Hungary. The crisis escalated. More refugee camps opened. The Austrians waived visa requirements for East Germans, but the Hungarians still did not allow them to leave. One day in early September, news leaked that the Hungarian government would open the border the next day and let East Germans out. Early in the morning I went to Ute and Agnes’s old camp. More journalists arrived. Someone set up a table on the lawn and put a television on it. I stood in a good position. The crowd of journalists grew. Not long after, a news presenter read a statement that the border was now open for East Germans.
People in the camp applauded. Some cried from happiness. I wanted to whoop with joy, hug people that I knew in the camp, but instead stood aside and recorded what I saw.
Children on a hillside waved Hungarian and West German flags. Then people ran and packed their belongings. Many families had camped in cars. Their interiors were strewn with blankets, bottles of water and food packages. Young guys painted the West German flag on cars. Others who feared the decision could be reversed just left.
A friend and I drove to the border, the highway north from Budapest to Austria, a sea of Trabants. People sang; passengers hung out the windows. At the border they cheered the guards who waved them through. For hours we stood and watched a steady stream of cars go by. Then in the early hours of the morning we drove back down the deserted highway to Budapest.
A week later I received my first letter from Sabine, who still lived in Dresden. By then she knew of Ute’s escape. I thought that I detected a note of bitterness in her letter when she wrote, “I was so busy that I couldn’t be sorry for Ute.”
Then I realized that Sabine missed Ute. “She [Ute] started to study now again. I hope the best for her. Sometimes I can’t believe it and it’s also difficult for me to stay alone in Dresden.” I thought of Sabine and Helga and the others who had stayed behind in East Germany and wondered what would happen next.
Soon I received a letter from Helga. She wrote that Ute was now studying chemistry in a town near Munich. Life in East Germany, Helga said, was turbulent. For several weeks people in Leipzig and Dresden participated in massive protest marches against the East German government. The protesters clashed with the police and the government imposed travel restrictions on East German citizens. Helga joined an opposition group that demanded political changes including free elections and economic reforms. She later wrote that “… the situation was really bad and sometimes I asked myself if it was the right decision to stay in the GDR [East Germany].”
I heard about these demonstrations on the radio. Some reports said that nearly 100,000 people marched at a time. I tried to imagine such huge crowds in narrow European streets, the possibility of tear gas and batons being used against them, but so many who demonstrated week after week was very bad news for Communist rulers.
On a grey Thursday morning in November, my clock radio alarm woke me, as usual, with the BBC news broadcast. The announcer said the Berlin Wall was being dismantled. I sat up in bed startled. This Wall that cut both Berlin and Germany in half was the ultimate symbol of the divide between communism and capitalism, Eastern Europe and the West. I could not believe the Wall would fall. I wanted to be there. Ute later captured in a letter what this event meant for East Germans. After her first walk from East Berlin to West Berlin she wrote, “you can’t imagine the feeling when I stood at last in this part of my home I never was allowed to go!”
I washed and dressed quickly, impatiently waited for public transport over the Széchenyi bridge to Moskva tér and Anna’s apartment. I arrived at 9:30 a.m. Anna and I swapped information in the kitchen and then she danced her way into the living room, as she celebrated the news. I followed behind, mugs of coffee in hand.
I tried to concentrate on the newspapers but felt distracted. I wanted to be in Berlin but had to stay put due to work obligations. Anna helped me develop a plan. If I took the last flight to East Berlin on Saturday night and the first back on Sunday, I could squeeze in a trip between assignments.
Helga lived in Berlin but left no telephone number for her university residence, which might not even have a phone. I would have no time to find her, but would just go to the Wall and spend the night there. I did not want to waste my few hours in Berlin on sleep.
I reached Checkpoint Charlie late at night. People laden with shopping bags streamed back from West Berlin. Laughter filled the air. There were so many happy faces and such exuberance on the West German side. It was one huge party at the Wall. That evening workers dismantled a section of the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. With such crowds on the West German side, I could not actually see, so I stayed in East Germany for a better view.
East Berlin was nearly deserted and seemed spooky. Beyond Checkpoint Charlie, I only bumped into a few stray tourists, including a figure skater and his coach. We walked near the Brandenburg Gate and saw a gaping hole in the Wall, an entire section gone. Armed East German border guards still patrolled the area. They scowled. I wanted a piece of the Wall as a souvenir, so I moved closer to pick one up. One of the guards said something to me in German that I did not understand. Then he pointed his gun in my direction. I stepped back.
I continued to receive news from Helga. Ute was reunited with her family. She and Helga spent New Year’s Eve celebrating under the Brandenburg Gate. Helga visited Ute in West Germany. Both now understood the size of the discrepancy between the two Germanys. Helga wrote that at her university in East Germany, “… we as students have to learn to fight for our rights now…. Some of the biggest problems are the bad living conditions in the dormitories, the old equipment in the laboratories, bad lectures, the low level of language education, too less money and so on. It was interesting and a little bit depressive to compare our conditions with those of Ute’s student life.”
I received my last letter from Helga in early 1990. She had changed universities and would soon study at the Technical University of West Berlin. She invited me to visit and offered to guide me through both sides of Berlin. She said that she now knew the Western sector well. I felt tempted, but already had my sights set on a trip in the opposite direction, farther east, into the Soviet Union.
3
KIEV
On an early June evening in 1990 nearly one year after Ute, Helga and Sabine had arrived at my apartment, I stood on a platform at the Keleti station in Budapest waiting to board the train to Kiev. A group of friends came to see me off. After the last hug, I turned to step up rusty metal rungs into
the train carriage. I heard a friendly voice behind me shout, “Behave yourself in the Gulag. I hope we see you again.”
I entered the carriage, and a new world. A worn red carpet stretched down the train corridor. I walked through the narrow passage to my compartment. I slid the door open. Faded cream-coloured curtains hung across the bottom half of the compartment window; the air smelled of dirty mop water. I faced four bunks. Mine was the top right-hand berth. I climbed up and stowed my bags away. I lay down and did not look out the window. I thought that I might change my mind about moving to Kiev if I saw my friends still by the train. I already missed them.
I heard the door slide open and shut my eyes, pretending to sleep. I was not yet ready to meet my cabin mates. A couple, husband and wife, and one other man settled in, speaking softly in Russian. The husband mumbled Tanya and something about bags.
“Ivan, leave the food on the table,” Tanya said. “Where’s the vodka? Don’t forget the pickles.” Ivan and Tanya did not know the second man, who had the bunk opposite me.
The train pulled out of the station. Budapest receded. We clickety-clacked down the track, the train swaying soothingly. I relaxed, my mind free to wander in a way it had not been able to since my time in hospital. I thought of Ute and remembered what she had said when I asked her why she wanted to escape – “I don’t feel free.” She built a new life in West Germany. I headed in the opposite direction, toward the centre of her old world. Anna’s husband, Gyula, had warned me that in this part of the Communist Bloc I might feel the same as Ute did. “The state will be your enemy,” he said. “It will control where you sleep, what you eat and when you leave.” I felt a pit in my stomach, a yawning chasm of worry as I thought back on those words. At the time, I dismissed them as exaggeration.
All that fear, anxiety and loneliness that accompany a new start crept back now – feelings that had been sealed away amid the excitement of planning for the move, the sense of possibility and potential. I thought that my test trip to Kiev a few months earlier had been successful. By chance, I had arrived in Ukraine at a time of major change, when a handful of members of the umbrella opposition movement, Rukh, just learned that they had been elected to the local Parliament, a small fissure of opposition MPs in an otherwise monolithic Communist legislature. I met with Ukrainian Foreign Ministry officials to request a visa and press accreditation. The request set a precedent as Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. There were no foreign journalists based in Kiev; they were all in Moscow. I received verbal support from Foreign Ministry representatives but after all these months had still not received the necessary documents. To move to Kiev with no certainty of accreditation was a risk. I clung to the idea that a promise is a promise but that pit in my stomach warned otherwise. At least I had made one acquaintance on my test trip, Yaroslav. He would be there to meet me at the train station and had found accommodation for me in Kiev.
