Revolution 1989 (50 page)

The West German Foreign Minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, had dispatched scores of extra consular officials to Sopron ‘to assist fellow Germans any way they could’. They acted as a form of pressure on the border guards, who would be more circumspect if they knew their actions were observed by foreign diplomats. Not that it was needed. The border guards, mostly young conscripts, had no intention of using force against the refugees. Kovács issued his men clear orders. ‘We gave instructions that there should be no border patrols in the area immediately next to the picnic site,’ he said. ‘In the areas beyond the picnic, if the patrols came across any East Germans trying to cross the border they should instruct them to stop and turn back. If they turned back, fine. If they didn’t then . . . O K , we should just count how many went across and then carry on with normal duties.’
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Nevertheless, the East Germans who planned to escape were nervous and scared. They could not know what orders Hungarian soldiers had been given. Up to now the Hungarian people had been remarkably generous. But the regime, while expressing sympathy for their plight, had done little to help them. At least they had not been sent back to East Germany. Berlin teachers Sylvia and Harry Lux had left their home just over a month ago with their seven-year-old son Danny. As soon as they had heard about the Pan-European Picnic they were determined to try to make it into Austria this day. They arrived by train in Sopron, 120 kilometres west of Budapest, in the early morning. ‘Outside the railway station there were two or three taxis with their doors already open . . . it was all planned so perfectly that you wondered how it was possible,’ Mrs Lux said;

She stopped for a short while just in front of the gap, watched by some Austrians on the other side. ‘I was not able to grasp that this really was it. And then one of [them] said, “Come on you can do it” . . . grabbed hold of me from the other side and pulled me through . . . and on the other side he shook my hand and said, “You’re free now.” I asked, “Is that true, they really can’t come and take me back?” We all cried and hugged each other.’
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More than 600 made it to Austria that day through the ‘symbolic’ gate and around 1,400 through the borders nearby. It was not a huge number; they were replaced within a couple of days by new refugees pouring into Hungary. East German television reported, without any pictures of the scenes at the picnic, that some ‘GDRcitizens had been seduced and paid to emigrate by the Federal Republic in order to slander our state’.

The Hungarian government realised it could not sit on its hands and do nothing for much longer. That was graphically driven home to the Prime Minister, Miklós Németh. ‘I was visiting a friend of mine who happened to live near the West German Consul General’s house. I had to step over bodies lying on the pavement waiting for the Consulate to open in the morning . . . to get West German passports. I could see the problem with my own eyes, we had to have a clear-cut solution.’

Minor disturbances had broken out in some parts of Budapest and a decision could not be delayed much longer. The East Germans wanted to send planes and trains to Hungary to take their citizens back: ‘We refused. We told them it was absolutely out of the question for you to hunt them here in Hungary and take them,’ Németh said. But they were allowed to send ‘diplomatic observers’. These turned out to be Stasi officers who kept a watch on the refugees. At one of the refugee centres in a church on the Buda side of the River Danube run by Csilla, Baroness von Boeselager and the Catholic priest Imre Kozma, a Stasi captain asked her for the names of everyone who was in the building or who had passed through it over the past weeks. She refused, outraged, but she agreed they could run an office in a van on a side street outside the gates. The intelligence agents started taking photographs of people entering and leaving the centre and an angry crowd gathered, shouting at them and pelting stones. Local police had to be called to keep the peace. The next night the van was vandalised and the following day it was withdrawn.
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The Hungarians were put under intense pressure from the West to let the East Germans go. The Americans turned the screws. The US Ambassador, Mark Palmer, demanded to meet the Foreign Minister, Gyula Horn. ‘I told him they could forget about trade and investment from the US if they sent the East Germans back,’ he said. But despite all the encouraging signals the Hungarians had been receiving for months, they were still unsure what the Russians would do if they allowed the East Germans to head West. It would have serious implications for the Soviet bloc.
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‘We were very worried about how the Soviets would react,’ said László Kovács, Hungary’s Deputy Foreign Minister. ‘We knew that the East German reaction would be virulent. We expected economic reprisals and we made contingency plans for that. But we were troubled by the response from Moscow.’ After several weeks’ hesitation they sent a note to Shevardnadze discreetly suggesting that they were considering opening the border. ‘We got a reply back quickly saying very simply that “this is an affair that concerns only Hungary, the GDR and West Germany”.’
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In Berlin the government was paralysed by the serious illness of Erich Honecker. On 8 July, at the annual Warsaw Pact leaders’ summit held this year in Bucharest, he had collapsed in agony clutching the right side of his abdomen and his back, shortly after making a speech to his peers warning of the great perils facing communism. He was rushed to the best hospital in the city, reserved for the top Party officials, where he was diagnosed with stones in his gall-bladder. After one night, he was flown back to Berlin. There it quickly became obvious that his condition was more serious: he had cancerous tumours in his bladder and surgeons had to operate urgently. Honecker was out of action for weeks and the extent of his illness was kept from the public. In dictatorships like the GDR nothing of importance could be decided without the supreme leader’s authority. ‘For a long time we were unable to say anything about the refugee crisis because of Honecker’s absence,’ Günter Schabowski said. ‘We were insecure about it, but we felt helpless. So we said OK let’s wait until he returns.’ But he was ill the whole of the summer and all efforts in the leadership to talk about the biggest issue facing the country were shelved until late September.

The East German Foreign Minister, Oskar Fischer, sent diplomatic notes to Budapest demanding the return of the East German citizens who had ‘illegally overstayed their visa regulations’. He reminded his counterpart, Horn, that apart from the Warsaw Pact agreement that all member states would honour each other’s travel laws, there was a treaty between the two countries signed on 20 June 1969 repeating the pledge. Horn said that an international treaty, like the Geneva Convention on Refugees, superseded bi-party agreements. They had reached an impasse. Fischer began talking to West German officials, but those negotiations broke down too.

The Exodus, as East Germans called it, was the main topic of conversation throughout the country. ‘Within every family there was at least one person asking the question: do we go, or do we stay here and keep hoping? The choice was agonising for people who may have hated the regime, but still had friends, families, jobs they liked, homes. The Exodus dominated life,’ Matthias Mueller, a history student in Berlin at the time, said. It dominated West German television news. Every day there were reports from Hungary about the refugees and footage from the Trabi trail with interviews of the mainly young families who were leaving.
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On East German TV it was hardly ever mentioned. Orders came from above to keep silent, said radio journalist Ferdinand Nor. ‘Then when it was no longer possible to hide the vacant apartments, the empty desks in offices and at schools, we began to denounce the refugees as politically illiterate and “criminal elements”.’ Instructions were given in the summer to journalists on
Neues Deutschland
from the Party leadership:

The Soviets were not prepared to help the East German regime. They thought the refugee crisis was a ‘good thing’ because it might make Berlin rethink, remove Honecker and spur it on to reform. Fischer met Shevardnadze privately. The Soviet Foreign Minister told him to allow free emigration. ‘It will not be bad. It will ease your economic burdens, too,’ Shevardnadze said. ‘You should talk to opposition groups as comrades are doing elsewhere.’ When he returned to Berlin, Fischer told his colleagues that they should expect no help from Moscow in this crisis of existence for the East German state.
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FORTY-ONE

 

IN HIS ROLE AS KINGMAKER, Wałesa considered three candidates for Prime Minister. All had served time in jail for varying periods as subversives. The presence of any of them as head of a Warsaw Pact government would have appalled Ceausescu or Honecker, who had now given up any hope that the Soviets would step in and halt the collapse of socialism in Poland. The prospect of dealing with any of them would have shocked almost every Communist Party official in Moscow just four years earlier. Now, shortly after eight minutes past one, when Tadeusz Mazowiecki was officially elected Polish Premier, the first message of congratulations he received was from his Soviet counterpart in the Kremlin.

Mazowiecki seemed an uninspiring choice for such a historic role. Yet it was precisely his virtues of modesty, humility and solidity that thrust his name forward, so different was he from Lech Wałesa. The other options would have been riskier - particularly fifty-five-year-old Jacek Kurón, one of the founding fathers of Polish opposition, who had been an active dissident since the 1960s. He had a brilliant analytical mind and shining integrity, but Wałesa thought he would have been too radical a choice. Bronisław Geremek, now fifty-seven, was moderate enough and had been an influential adviser to the independent trade union since Solidarity was founded. Latterly an academic, for a short while he followed a diplomatic career and was dispatched, as a young official, to the Polish Embassy in Paris. But he became disillusioned with the Party and returned to his fourteenth-century manuscripts. He was a shrewd political tactician and a tough negotiator, but argumentative and quick to take offence, thought Wałesa.

Mazowiecki was a safe bet. He was widely respected in Poland and abroad. After his release from jail in 1984 he had been allowed to travel and he was a powerful advocate in the West for Solidarity’s cause. The clinching factor was that, unlike the other two, he was a devout Catholic who had excellent contacts at the Vatican and with the Polish episcopate. There was one problem, though. Mazowiecki was publicly against Solidarity forming a government. Generally he had good relations with Wałesa, even when they disagreed. Sometimes he thought the former electrician was too high-handed and dictatorial, but he invariably trusted his judgement about people and strategy. Wałesa felt sure he could work his charm and persuade Mazowiecki that a Solidarity government was now the only sensible course and that he, Mazowiecki, was the right man to lead it.

The seduction, as Mazowiecki once described it, not entirely as a joke, took place on the evening of 18 August at a dinner in the dismal restaurant of the faded but once grand Europejski Hotel, on the edge of Warsaw’s Old Town. Initially, Mazowiecki made a show of not wanting the job, and insisted that Wałesa should take it. Then he said he would accept the post on condition that Wałesa would allow him a free hand and would ‘not try to run things from behind the scenes’. He did not want the entourage around Wałesa trying to place pressure on him either. He wanted to be his own man. He insisted on choosing his team of ministers, with nobody looking over his shoulder. Wałesa agreed to keep in the background, but said he would always be available to co-operate.
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Jaruzelski was still brooding about being the Polish Communist who lost power. He remained a True Believer, even though the entire edifice of Soviet authority which he so admired was falling apart. He accepted Mazowiecki’s appointment. He respected him. Jaruzelski insisted that his two close friends and associates, Generals Kiszczak and Siwicki, retain their posts at the Interior Ministry and Defence. Cardinal Glemp strongly approved of the choice and the Pope was delighted. He invited the new PM for an audience at the Vatican to receive a blessing.