Forty Autumns

by Nina Willner

  As part of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to eliminate medium-range missiles in Europe and cut their overall nuclear arsenals in half. Not long thereafter, Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to remove Pershing and SS-20 nuclear missiles from Europe.

  In June 1987, President Reagan visited Berlin, stood in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, and made what would become one of his most famous speeches. In front of bulletproof glass protecting him from potential snipers in East Berlin, he proclaimed, “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev. Tear down this Wall.”

  Along with the rest of the world, I watched Reagan’s address from my television at my home in Fort Meade, Maryland, where, after being promoted to captain, I was assigned to a strategic intelligence position. My mother watched the address from her home in Washington, D.C. East Germans too were tuning in, hearing Reagan’s call to end repression in East Germany and end the Cold War.

  In Karl Marx City, Heidi heard Reagan’s translated speech from West Germany. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if Oma’s prophecy about the family reuniting with my mother could ever possibly come true. But then, just as quickly, she discounted that idea, thinking there was no chance, that nothing in East Germany could change as long as Honecker, his fellow hard-line communists, and the secret police remained in control.

  Before deciding whether she could join the East German national team in traveling to Italy, Cordula, now seventeen, had to undergo a special security screening.

  Every year since joining the program, she had truthfully filled out a questionnaire about her connections with people in the East and West, and answered probing questions about relatives in “capitalist countries.” She had always been forthright and honest about her non-relationship with her aunt Hanna, and the state minders had always seemed satisfied with her responses. But travel outside the Eastern Bloc was an entirely different matter and they needed to be assured of the athletes’ loyalties and determine that they were not interested in defecting.

  The East German leadership counted on their security apparatus to root out potential flight risks. A defection would cause the regime a major embarrassment. East Germany could not afford any more negative publicity. The security official called her in.

  “How often is your family in contact with your mother’s sister or any relatives in the West?” the official asked, no doubt already knowing the answer.

  “My mother doesn’t communicate with her sister anymore.”

  “How would you like to live in another country?”

  “I can’t imagine living in another country,” Cordula answered truthfully. “I have everything here. My family is here. My life is here. Why should I want to go to the West when I have everything here?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Your family is here and they are very important to you, aren’t they?”

  The official then told her about an athlete who had defected a year earlier.

  “She had nothing when she left. No money, no support. Nothing. Now she is destitute, maybe not even alive. She disappointed her country, her family and herself. After all we did for her . . .” He shook his head, then looked at Cordula. Saying nothing further, he dismissed her, leaving her unsure about whether she had passed the screening and would be given the chance to compete internationally on Western soil.

  Then, one afternoon, her trainers called her in and told her the news. She had been selected to compete in the world championships in Bergamo, Italy.

  She went to call her parents, who were packing the Skoda for their weekend at the bungalow.

  The instructions were crystal clear. The team had to remain as one unit, staying together at all times. No one could go off alone. Once they arrived in Italy, they could converse only with their Eastern Bloc compatriots. Talking to anyone from the West was strictly forbidden. Speaking to any West German would get one sent home and kicked off the team.

  “Stay focused,” the trainers reminded the girls. “You are here for one reason only and that is to represent your country proudly, and win.”

  With the trainers hovering over their six athletes, in July 1987 they flew to Bergamo from Schönefeld Airport in East Berlin on East Germany’s state-owned airline, Interflug. On the airplane, when Cordula had to use the restroom, the trainers sent one of her teammates to go with her.

  In Italy, they stayed together, moving as one tight-knit cluster wherever they went. Their trainers watched their every move.

  Cordula was stunned at the differences between Italy and East Germany. She felt like she had flown onto another planet. People everywhere were smiling, even laughing openly. There was an atmosphere of openness, lightness, and unguarded happiness, the likes of which Cordula had never seen before. People looked one another in the eye, grabbed one another in big exaggerated embraces, and showered one another with enthusiastic displays of affection. There was warmth, color, and energy everywhere, in stark contrast to East Germany’s subdued cold and gray.

  The trainers, however, worked to dismiss the positives, constantly pointing out to the girls what they called “deficiencies of capitalist countries.” When a group of nicely dressed Italian tourists stopped and pleasantly asked directions, the trainers waved them off. Turning to the girls, one of them said, “Did you see that? They were begging for money. They’re homeless. They’re really in bad shape.” The girls snuck glances at one another, but nodded to the trainers that they understood. Cordula, however, new to the game, in her naïveté, missed the cues and blurted out, “They don’t look so bad to me.” Andrea elbowed her. One sharp glare from a trainer and shaking heads from her teammates and Cordula understood that she should keep her thoughts to herself.

  To help motivate their athletes, the trainers gave the girls spending money to buy anything they wanted, but there were restrictions. They were prohibited from buying anything with a Western logo, and were required to keep their purchases out of sight once they got back to the East, forbidden to share or even show others what they had bought in the West. Approval to own such luxury items came with a cautionary warning not to flaunt them, so as not to risk awakening people’s needs or desires.

  With their allotted money, Cordula and teammate Andrea both bought Sony Walkmans, portable audiocassette players with lightweight headphones, all the rage at the time in the United States and around the world.

  Thrilled with her first purchase outside the East, Cordula turned to Andrea.

  “This is fantastic!” she whispered to Andrea, who smiled back at her.

  After an admirable performance, the East German team returned home, the trainers relieved once they got their athletes back onto East German soil. They reminded the girls to downplay their experience and not to give anyone the impression that their trip outside the East had been anything special, but rather that it was all business, mundane and routine.

  Over the next year, Cordula and her teammates continued to compete in national and international competitions in Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. Having medaled or placed in some of the major races, Cordula was then selected to begin training for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. She and her teammates spent the next few months in intensive training at camps and on cycling tours. One month before the Olympics, three of the six on the national team were chosen to represent East Germany. The most junior and the youngest on the team at the age of eighteen, Cordula was not among the top three, but was designated an alternate.

  At that Olympics, East Germany won more medals in cycling than any other country, and came in second overall in medals, with the Soviet Union winning 132 medals, East Germany 102, the United States 94, and West Germany 40.

  After the Olympics, Cordula remained on the national team and continued to train and participate in international competitions.

  By now, from Paradise Bunga
low and at their flat in the city, Heidi and Reinhard were regularly tuning in to news from around the world, to track the changes occurring outside East Germany. They listened intently to Gorbachev’s speeches. The East German program Aktuelle Kamera at 7:30 P.M. was followed by West Germany’s Tagesschau at 8:00. While East German news downplayed the changes taking place in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries and hailed progress at home, Western news media praised the sweeping changes in the Soviet Union and glorified Gorbachev. Honecker remained entirely unmoved.

  “Our policy of reform . . . has borne fruit and will continue to bear it,” he insisted. “Who wants to talk us into changing, and why?”

  Fully aware that many East Germans were tuning in to Western broadcasts, Honecker worried that news of rapidly changing events taking place in other Eastern Bloc countries could undermine his grip on power, so he tried to distract them. He adopted a strategy that gave the appearance of change by introducing lighthearted comedies and lively films with toned-down propaganda, in a more subtle campaign to discredit the need to reform.

  In 1988, at the height of his fame and in the middle of his Bad World Tour, Michael Jackson gave an open-air concert in West Berlin, on the Reichstag lawn with the Berlin Wall as a backdrop. East German authorities, knowing full well that their young citizens would be drawn to his music, staged a competing rock concert in East Berlin, emceed by East German Olympic figure skating superstar Katarina Witt. But that didn’t stop some from trying to get close enough to the West to hear the King of Pop.

  At first, East German security forces did nothing, even appeared to allow it, but when more people started streaming in to get close to the Wall, suddenly everything changed. The VoPo brought out their truncheons and violently descended upon the crowd. As concertgoers on the west side of the Wall were having the time of their lives, dancing and singing along to “Thriller” and “Man in the Mirror,” under the cover of darkness on the other side of the Wall, hundreds of young East Germans were being clobbered and hauled away.

  In the mid-1980s, after Roland retired, he started writing more frequently. Though his words were carefully chosen, his letters vague and lacking in any real information, Hanna was deeply happy that she could finally be in touch with her much-loved big brother, whom she had been completely robbed of a connection with and had missed so terribly.

  But in 1988, shocking news came from the East. Roland’s wife wrote to say that Roland had died. Hanna was devastated. She had not even known he was ill with diabetes. He was only sixty-two.

  Roland’s wife and son and the entire family gathered to bury him in Valfitz, where he had served proudly as a school director and teacher for so many years.

  With all the changes taking place in Eastern Europe, Heidi and many others couldn’t help wondering what would happen in East Germany if Honecker was the only Soviet bloc leader to resist change. She thought about the Workers’ Uprising of 1953 and could not imagine a revolution in East Germany without bloodshed.

  Heidi looked at photos of our family, my parents and us six children. In the United States, my mother looked over photos of her family in the East. She watched Gorbachev on television and tried to imagine what it would all end up meaning for East Germany and ultimately for her family. We were soon to find out that, though Gorbachev had little influence on the East German leadership and though Honecker remained entrenched, there would indeed be change.

  In fact, the winds of change were already blowing without Honecker’s consent.

  24

  “GORBY, SAVE US!”

  A NATION CRUMBLES

  (1989)

  If not me, who? And if not now, when?

  —General Secretary of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev

  In the East, Warsaw Pact nations responded to Gorbachev’s call for change. In Hungary, the parliament voted to allow freedom of association and assembly, to permit the establishment of political parties, and to set a date for multiparty elections the following year. This daring move when tried thirty years earlier had provoked a brutal Soviet crackdown. This time Moscow did not intervene.

  In Poland, the Solidarity movement, striving to throw off the shackles of communism and create a democracy, continued to gain momentum. Honecker still refused to budge.

  In February 1989, a twenty-year-old East German named Chris Gueffroy, whose greatest wish was to see America, believing that border guards had been ordered to stand down their shoot-to-kill orders, tried to escape over the Wall. No such order had been issued, however, and border guards shot and killed Gueffroy.

  One month later, Winfried Freudenberg made it out in a homemade hot-air balloon but was killed when it crashed to the ground in the American sector in Zehlendorf, not far from the apartment I had lived in for three years.

  By June, in a crushing defeat of Polish communism, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Party swept the elections. When the Polish communist authorities phoned Gorbachev to find out what they should do, if they should really concede and abide by the election results, Gorbachev said, “The time has come to yield power.”

  In China, hard-line leaders called in the army to suppress a democracy movement in a brutal and bloody crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Honecker watched it all, envisioning a Tiananmen-like crackdown should things get out of hand in East Germany. However, he wondered how the lack of Soviet backing would affect his ability to retain control.

  For most East Germans tuning in to the transformations taking place all around them, it was life as usual, especially in light of the fact that only a few months earlier, Honecker had declared, “The Wall will still be standing in a hundred years.”

  For Heidi and Reinhard, life went on. At work, no one spoke of revolution or the possibility of change in East Germany. The rest of the family too went on with their lives, teaching and working in the towns and cities in which they lived.

  Cordula and the national team continued to train, compete, and win races at home and abroad.

  In June 1989, Cordula became the East German national women’s champion in the points race event, a mass cycling event involving dozens of top East German racers covering some one hundred laps.

  In July, Cordula and the East German national women’s cycling team flew to Switzerland.

  By now a seasoned team member, she knew the routine.

  The girls dressed into their blue-and-gray competition uniforms in the locker room, then emerged onto the track as one unit. As their trainers lined their bikes on the track, the girls readied themselves, stretching and listening to their trainers’ last-minute words of motivation.

  Suddenly there was a terrific scuffle. All the East German trainers bolted from the track and disappeared, leaving the team alone to finish setting up without them.

  With the start of the race only seconds away, team members positioned themselves and tried to focus. But then one of the girls asked, “Where’s Andrea?”

  Looking around, they noticed Andrea was not among them. The race began, the other cyclists took off, leaving the East German team struggling to refocus.

  At the end of the race, one of the trainers stood waiting for the girls. The other trainers did not show up until hours later, and when they did, there was no explanation.

  The next morning, they told the girls the news. Andrea had defected.

  Cordula and the others were astounded. It was incomprehensible and completely unexpected. Andrea had been a model East German athlete and had never let on about her intentions.

  And so the East German national women’s cycling contingent returned home without one of their strongest, most capable, and most talented members.

  Less than one month later, the dominoes began to fall.

  By August 1989, Hungary had disabled its border defenses, including electrified fences with Austria, effectively opening passage into Western Europe. Word of the opening to the West spread via media reports. By September, more than thirteen thousand East German “tourists” in Hungary had fled to Austr
ia. Honecker called them scum and ingrates who had abandoned the cause.

  Inside East Germany, many were driven to act. From a small gathering at a Prayers for Peace meeting at the little Nikolai Church in Leipzig, a demonstration of about a thousand kicked off but was quickly suppressed by the VoPo. But instead of dispersing, more demonstrators streamed in, reviving the protest, and before long, tens of thousands were taking to the streets in that city, overwhelming police and calling for peaceful, democratic order in East Germany and chanting in unison, “We want out!”

  By mid-September 1989, in the United States, I was glued to the TV in my home in Maryland, carefully following the extraordinary events unfolding in Eastern Europe. Now married to a fellow army officer, who was also a U.S. Army Russian Foreign Area Officer, I was nine months pregnant with my second child as my husband and I watched thousands of East Germans making their way to Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and those seeking asylum on the grounds of West German embassies.

  In Washington, my mother too watched as families who had driven from East Germany abandoned their Trabants in the streets of Prague and scrambled over walls to get onto the grounds of the West German embassy, passing babies, young children, suitcases, and strollers over the back fence of the embassy compound and into the welcoming hands of fellow East German refugees who had already made it over and were waiting on the other side.

  Over the next days and weeks, that crowd swelled into the thousands, camping out on the lawn, worrying and waiting for some sign that the West Germans would not send them back to East Germany, where they would face dire consequences as traitors to the regime.