• BBC coverage
• 1989 – Europe’s revolution

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: 20 years ago today, people power toppled eastern Europe’s most repressive regime.  Romania dictatorship Nicoli Kaf was caught off guard by 6 days of protest and violence across the country.  He and his wife fled Bucharest by helicopter.  It was the last of the 1989 revolutions, and the bloodiest.  More then 1000 people died.  Today there’s little observance of the anniversary in Romania, that’s impart because so many questions still remain about what really happened there in December 1989.  Matthew Brunwasser reports from Bucharest.

MATTHEW BRUNWASSER: if democracy has a price, few have paid more than the congregants of the church of the martyred heroes of December 1989.  This service for the dead is asking god to forgive the sins of family members buried in the adjoining cemetery…. 290 casualties of the chaos 20 years ago. After the service, people go out and tend to the graves. 25-year old Mateo Vasiliu says his family still doesn’t know much about his father’s death.

MATEO VASILIU: He was at work, and from a nearby building military troops were shooting everywhere, so they told. I don’t know. We still don’t know the truth and we’re never gonna know what was happening at that time.

BRUNWASSER: Few have been prosecuted, even fewer convicted. Vassiliu says that punishment won’t ease his loss. But learning the truth might help Romania make a clean break with its communist past.

VASILIU: All these people died for a free Romania, for a democratic Romania, for a free country. But I don’t feel this freedom.

BRUNWASSER: There are a few undisputed facts of the revolution. It began in the city of Timisoara, with protests against the harassment of an anti-communist catholic priest.  And then it spread.  Ceaucescu ordered troops to fire on unarmed demonstrators.   He remained in control until December 22.  But the vast majority of the revolution’s casualties victims?  Were killed after December 22, in chaotic scenes like this one in central Bucharest. No one knows exactly who was shooting at whom or why.  Actor Ion Caramitru was a revolution leader.  He says the official line is that there was a revolution and new leadership stepped in to establish order.  He says Romanians don’t buy it.

ION CARAMITRU: This is a terrible dilemma. After 20 years we couldn’t  judge how to present the revolution except to say it was a movement, a spontaneous movement against communism and Ceausescu. This is not a real history.

BRUNWASSER: He says the communist officials who took control after Ceausescu have never revealed how they seized power. There are also various theories about the involvement of foreign powers. Sociologist Catalin Stoika says the post-1989 political elite paid a price for not clearing things up.

CATALIN STOIKA: The new power failed to gain legitimacy.

BRUNWASSER: The trial of Ceausescu, for example, lasted only a few hours and ended with his execution later the same day. Stoika says Romanians have what sociologists call “fragmented narratives” about that time.

STOIKA: The data shows that we still lack a shared understanding about what happened in December 1989, you get 47% believing it was a revolution, and you get 36% of adult Romanians thinking it was a coup d’etat.  So you can see here there are 2 opposite understandings of the recent past.

BRUNWASSER: Passersby in a subway station pause to look at a small exhibition of photos and video from the revolution. It’s one of the few places in Bucharest where the anniversary is noted.  Corina Rebedja says the fuzziness about what really happened makes Romanians more cynical about politics today.

CORINA REBEDJA: And it does create this suspicion among the people, you don’t know who is a communist and who is not, and whatever their interests are, and how people got to power, was it because they are capable or because they have connections with the former regime?

BRUNWASSER: Alexandra Coca is upset that most Romanians don’t care much about the revolution. She says regardless of what happened behind the scenes, the people on the streets were heroes.

ALEXANDRA COCA: Even if now we all agree it wasn’t only a revolution then, I think that you can see in their faces in this exhibition, that they were really believing, they were not playing, they did it because they believed it, and for this reason their sacrifice I think it was very real and we should never forget it.

BRUNWASSER: One revolutionary group used a court case this year to get access to a large chunk of archives about the revolution. But it had to go to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, France. Romanians say they want the truth to come out to give moral value to their democratic present, not to settle old political scores.  For the world, I’m Matthew Brunwasser, Bucharest, Romania.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Berlin, only a tiny stretch of the wall remains as a memorial. From 1961 to 1989, 89 people were killed trying to escape over it. Such attempts are well documented. But a less talked about Cold War border was even deadlier. We’re referring to the northernmost section of the border separating East Germany from West Germany. Twenty four years ago, our Europe Correspondent Gerry Hadden lived along that dividing line, in the tiny beach town of Travemunde, West Germany. He recently went back to see how things have changed, and to learn more about those who tried to escape there. Download MP3

Gerry also produced this slideshow:

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH, Boston.  You could say the Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989.  Organizers of next week’s 20th anniversary festivities hope to recapture the euphoria of the moment.  But there are also sober memories of the split between East and West Germany.  Eighty-nine people were killed trying to cross the wall.  Even more died trying to flee East Germany at the northernmost section of the border.  That’s where The World’s Gerry Hadden used to live, in the beach town of Travemunde.  He recently returned and sent us this report.

GERRY HADDEN: Travemunde literally means Mouth of the Trave River.  The Trave empties here into the Baltic Sea, and it once divided West from East.  I lived here, on the west side, as an exchange student in 1986.  The town is much the same today:  tidy, wealthy, built mostly around sailing and tourism.  During the summer months it really comes alive.  But during the Cold War, the warm months brought constant reminders of a divided country in the form of people trying to   escape over the sea.   I lived here in winter, so I never saw an escape attempt, but locals, like 45 year old Torsten Eichhof, did.  Fishing along the Trave’s bank recently, he recalls a night twenty years ago when he was bartending in a nearby beach hotel.

TORSTEN EICHHOF:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  He says, “I was working a night shift in the pub when suddenly the door swung open.  Standing outside were these four soaking wet people, a couple and two kids.  They said, ‘Can someone call the authorities?  We’ve just escaped from East Germany.’  They’d made it in a little dinghy.  We wrapped them up in warm blankets, then cooked them some big steaks.  Only after they’d had a good first meal did we call the police.”  According to researchers nearly 6,000 people

tried to cross this stretch of Baltic during the Cold War.  Nearly a thousand made it; 174 people died.  The rest were caught.  I remember what made the crossing here so dangerous.  Less than a mile from Travemunde’s beaches, East German military gunboats patrolled day and night.  On land a triple fence, covered in barbed wire and surrounded by mines, reached right to the water’s edge.  You never saw anyone just out walking on the East side.   It made you wonder what life was like over there.  Today a ferry plods across the mouth of the Trave.  It leaves us about a mile from the old East/ West checkpoint.  But just before going through that checkpoint, I stop in at the   house of Cristina Volkt-Mueller and her husband Bodo.   The Muellers are from the former East.   In the early 1980s they tried  to escape in a sailboat, but they were caught before clearing port.

CRISTINA MUELLER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  Cristina says, “It’s still hard to describe the feelings. You think, my god, what is going to happen now? There’s nothing you can do.  You’re trapped.  It’s a terrible feeling of powerlessness and fear.  We’d spent a lot of time working this escape out, anticipating freedom.  When that gets quashed you are just devastated.”  The Muellers, like tens of thousands of others, ended up in a Stasi jail.  After their release, they spent years under state surveillance.  Today Cristina and Bodo research Baltic escape attempts.  Bodo tells me of one man who invented a hand-held underwater jet that pulled him to freedom.  Another guy painted his sailboat sails black and tried at night.  He got nabbed.  A third man, a doctor, swam 30 miles to the West, fueled by methamphetamines.  But Bodo says most people tried to flee simply on whatever was at hand, on whatever floated.

BODO MUELLER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   Bodo says many people tried to paddle across on air mattresses because having a

boat was complicated, because you had to smuggle a boat to the beach in pieces and assemble it there.  But if you were staying in a legal campsite you could have an air mattress.   So many people tried to escape spontaneously.  But the sea is cold and often there are heavy waves.  Lots of people drowned.  On this day I make the crossing in the other direction on land in a car.  It’s the first time I visited this once off limits area.  In the nearby village of Poetenitz I meet Sabina Kieler.  While I was studying in Travemunde, Kieler was working on a farm I could literally see, right across the border.  She says only a select few were allowed so close to the enemy.

SABINA KIELER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “You had to finish your work by 8 PM.  If you were still in the fields after that or you didn’t have your passport they’d lock you up for three days.  It was very confined work.  You couldn’t go left or right.  There were no toilets so we would go into the bushes, but you had to be careful.  If you took one step too far the guards would descend on you.”  Kieler says one day in early November, 1989, someone came running across the fields yelling that the border had opened.  At first no one believed him, then the joy set in.  As the news spread, Kieler and other East Germans poured into Travemunde by the tens of thousands.   And West Germans came out to greet them with champagne and gifts.   But 20 years later Kieler says reunification has been a mixed bag.

KIELER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “Some things are better.  You can travel anywhere and buy whatever you want. But some things are worse, for example, childcare. Back in the old days there was guaranteed space for all kids in daycare.  Today hardly anyone gets in because there just too few spots.”  The other thing is the economy, she says, Lots of the old manufacturing here was destroyed with reunification.  And the West, she says, didn’t invest much in revitalizing the local economy.  But overall Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to help the East get backs on its feet.  And as time passes it’s clear that the differences between the two Germanys have lessened.  That’s good news for everyone, but for Ingrid Schatz it also presents a danger.    Schatz runs the Lubeck Border Museum.   It’s housed in a former East German passport inspection house just across the old line from Travemunde.

INGRID SCHATZ:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   On a recent morning, Schatz is showing the black and white photos of the massive border installations that once dominated the countryside.  She says, “Everything you see in the photo is gone.  The big border station, the fences, everything.  The only thing remaining is this one house.  That’s why we started this border museum.”  She says a German border like this, as deadly as it once was, should not just be forgotten. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Travemunde, Germany.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.