1989

by Peter Millar

  It was during my second two-week spell in Warsaw that I made my own single biggest contribution to the Polish economy. It was early December, 1981, and by now the crisis in the Polish economy was coming to a peak with the result that petrol supplies were severely limited. An empty tank meant a wait of several hours in a queue that could stretch for over a kilometre to get to the pumps. People took it in turns to stay by the car, usually having to push it along a few yards at a time: fuel was too precious to waste starting and stopping the engine in the queue. Petrol could be paid for in zlotys, but the national currency was plummeting so fast with rampant inflation that almost everything worth having that wasn’t an absolute necessity had to be paid for in hard currency. While in East Germany this meant D-Marks, in Poland it meant US dollars, not least because whereas most East Germans had relatives who sent them money from West Germany, most Poles’ relations abroad lived in the United States, mostly in Chicago.

  The government, willing to do anything that encouraged the influx of hard currency into the economy, allowed Poles to keep US dollar bank accounts. The Reuters office ran almost entirely on dollars, drawing notes in large and small denominations weekly from the bank. The customary thing at a petrol station was to slip the attendant a one-dollar bill to make sure he filled your tank right to the top. When eventually my turn came and I pushed the East Berlin office VW Golf up to the pump – I was leaving for home in a couple of days’ time and did not want to run out en route as, especially in the provinces, it could take a couple of days to fill up again – I gratefully pushed a note into his hand and drove off. It was only some hours later, back at the office, when I was settling how much money I had to leave in Poland and how much I had drawn on my own account, that I realised I was $100 short. Well, $99 to be precise. With my only trip to the US having been as a child many years previously I had failed to reckon with the only world currency which had all its notes the same shape and colour. Instead of $1 I had slipped the petrol station attendant $100. There was no point in going back. To a Pole at that time $100 was practically a life-changing sum of money. The Warsaw man laughed and said it was a lesson well learned, if a trifle expensively. I took the hit. And rejigged my expenses claim for the trip.

  The drive back to Berlin was a nightmare: eight hours on bad roads through a building blizzard. As night fell and I approached the East German border, with still an hour to go before I got back to Berlin I was staring through the windscreen at what looked like the scene from the bridge of the USS Enterprise when Captain Kirk engaged warp drive. I had no choice but to carry on; I was already cutting it fine for the next day was the date set for the biggest set-piece story of my whole time in East Germany. For the first time, a West German chancellor – Helmut Schmidt – was paying an official visit to East Germany. After all the years when Bonn had refused to recognise the East German state’s legitimacy, the bridge-building begun by Willy Brandt was finally reaching the apparently logical conclusion. Realpolitik would win out over sentiment. The Federal Republic of Germany would from now on treat the German Democratic Republic, in theory at least, in the same way as any other country. It was a legitimisation that Erich Honecker, the diminutive East German dictator, himself a West German by birth, had long hoped for. For Schmidt – if not for all his fellow countrymen – it was an overdue piece of gesture politics that would improve Bonn’s relations with Moscow and the Soviet bloc as a whole. East Berlin, normally little regarded by the world press, had become a media circus for the event. I certainly was counting for the first time in ages on a front-page story. In the event, it barely made it into most papers.

  I awoke the next morning with the television in the office already blaring as Erdmute sipped her coffee watching the build-up to the official handshake. But it was the reams of paper spewing out of the teleprinter that grabbed my attention, and the regular rows of bells. I gave her a questioning look. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘something’s happened in Poland.’ I ripped the copy from the teleprinter. Something had happened. Overnight, probably only hours after I had crossed the Polish-East German border, General Jaruzelski had decided enough was enough, that if he didn’t act, then the Russians would and, as so long dreaded yet anticipated, Warsaw would be added to the list after Budapest and Prague of brutally crushed experiments in reforming the communist system. He had declared martial law. Solidarity was banned. Overnight Walesa and its other leaders had been dragged from their beds and imprisoned. The borders had been sealed, mail suspended and telephone wires cut. The reports on the teleprinter were being written in London head office from official statements released by the Polish government. There was no way of establishing independent contact with Warsaw. If I had stayed, I would have been stuck there, albeit on top of one of the major news stories in the world. But with no way to get reports out of the country.

  My own reporting on the big Berlin ‘summit’ was perfunctory and completely overshadowed by the news – or lack of it – from Poland, all of which was dominated by official pronouncements on radio and television. The only thing I could do, after long conversations with London, was to drive back the way I had just come, to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, the little town which effectively straddled the border. It straddled it because, prior to 1945, the Polish-German border hadn’t been there; it had been some hundred miles further east. Since Poland’s forcible movement west, the bit of Frankfurt that lay on the east bank of the Oder River had been renamed Slubice. But it was still scarcely possible to pretend it was really a town, being as it had always been little more than the overflow suburbs – rather like the bits of old Berlin where Hannelore’s uncle Pieps had lived, cut off from the rest of the city by the Wall. As a result the border regulations were relaxed for locals on either side. As there was virtually no industry in Slubice, most of the inhabitants crossed the little pedestrian bridge over the river daily to work in Frankfurt.

  With few other possibilities of getting live, independent news out of Poland itself, my idea was over the next few days to drive out there on a regular basis and simply hang around the Western end of the bridge waiting for Polish workers to cross to ask them for information about what life was like under the martial regime. It was a good idea in theory and yielded news that schools and universities had been suspended, and that the curfew imposed from dusk to dawn was being strictly enforced by armed soldiers on every street. But there was a limit to what my Polish could manage, no East Germans were being allowed to cross the other way, and the number of workers actually crossing had reduced to a mere trickle. So after a few days spent standing around in snow and sleet at one end of a bridge in a bleak, barren and mostly empty landscape, I decided it was no longer productive.

  Just when it seemed that the Poles had locked down news out of their militarised state for the foreseeable future I got a sudden telephone call that changed everything. It came from West Berlin and was from Gail Mooney, the wife of the Reuters Warsaw correspondent, who had been given permission to leave the country with their young child. She had taken the overnight train and was in a hotel near the Kurfürstendamm and was keen to see me: she had, she said guardedly, both of us conscious that we were not the only parties to our conversation, ‘lots to tell me’.

  She had, too. Not only could she fill me in on masses of detail about the huge stricture imposed on everyday life in the short period since martial law had been declared, she had hidden in her underwear a tiny notebook filled with scribble in minuscule writing from her husband, giving news about the political situation, about which Solidarity leaders had been arrested – which until then nobody had known – as well as quotes from a few brave dissident figures who so far remained at large and were fully aware that making a statement that would be reported in the West might well spell an end to their freedom. It was great stuff and we sat together for several hours as I debriefed her on everything I could imagine was pertinent to the story. I then retreated to the West Berlin office and began turning Gail’s words and Brian’s notes into a coherent story, with his
name of course and a Warsaw ‘dateline’. It was the first piece of direct reporting to emerge from Poland since the clampdown and made headlines around the world. Reuters were delighted just as the Polish authorities were enraged and I had no doubt living conditions in the Warsaw office would deteriorate accordingly.

  The martial law declaration in Poland was seen elsewhere however as a clear indication that the doom-merchants had been correct, that only so much red rag could be waved at the Kremlin bull. It was widely speculated that Jaruzelski had been given an ultimatum from Moscow, although he would eventually claim that the reality was quite different, that he had made the difficult decision himself in order to pre-empt an invasion which he was convinced would otherwise have been inevitable. To this day Poles argue about whether or not he was right. Either way, the flame of resistance in the Soviet empire had been snuffed out. The Swords to Ploughshares movement in East Germany did not exactly die out but tough talk in what might loosely have been called ‘oppositional circles’ went suddenly quiet for a while. That was why I was initially quite surprised with the news that Volker came to me with early in the second week of February 1982.

  Volker told me he had heard from ‘some of his friends’ that there was going to be a ‘sort of demonstration’ in Dresden on February 13th, the eve of St Valentine’s Day and the anniversary of the wartime bombing of the city. He didn’t know what exactly – he was never a very precise sort of bloke at the best of times – but he thought it would be a sort of get-together around the rubble of the Frauenkirche: ‘Just to say no to all bombs and stuff.’ It wasn’t quite as mundane as he made it sound. There was no question that the Frauenkirche would be an emotionally powerful focal point. Dresden’s Church of Our Lady had seemed miraculously to survive the horrendous firestorm unleashed by the US and British air forces above a city that at that stage of the war was primarily a clearing point for refugees and prisoners-of-war.

  The morning after the 650,000 incendiary bombs had consumed the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, reducing some of Europe’s most beautiful baroque buildings to ashes and leaving tens of thousands of blackened corpses on the still smouldering streets, the great soaring dome still stood intact, even glowing amidst the swirling dust and soot. But it was glowing for a reason: temperatures inside at the height of the firestorm had reached 1,000 degrees Centigrade. Nobody – of the few who were left alive and not caring for the badly burned or burying the dead – dared even approach because of the radiated heat. It took another twenty-four hours for what was effectively a ticking time bomb to go off. At ten a.m. on February 15th the superheated stonework of the pillars that supported the great dome literally exploded, sending some 6,000 tonnes of stone crashing to the earth, plunging even into the crypt below.

  But it was remarkable enough that a few of the young hippies whom Volker hung around with were planning to ever make any sort of public statement. To do so surely risked at the very least temporary arrest by the police, and possibly interrogation by the Stasi.

  ‘Do you know how many?’ I asked, in the tone of a mate, which is what I was, rather than a reporter.

  ‘Uh, no, not really,’ replied Volker with a broad smile, in that spellbindingly absent way he had of answering anything even vaguely approximating a question.

  ‘Are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Uh yeah, well yeah. Maybe. Don’t know about transport though.’ He couldn’t drive, obviously. A train to Dresden wasn’t hard – or expensive – but it would have required effort and imagination. And he wasn’t good on either. Then the obvious occurred to me: ‘I could give you a lift.’

  It was more than obvious really. I had already decided that this had to be a story of some kind: the first protest of any sort by East German young people, even if it wasn’t really anti-government in any way, or anti-Soviet, at least overtly. It wasn’t government-sanctioned or approved. And that in those days was newsworthy enough. I knocked out a few basic paragraphs on the lines of: ‘Young East Germans affiliated to the Swords to Ploughshares peace movement are planning to stage a demonstration against the spread of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe at the Frauenkirche next Saturday night, sources close to the movement said.’

  Not altogether to my surprise, it made a brief item on the next night’s evening news on ARD, the first West German television channel, although it added that the network’s own correspondent had been unable to unearth any more details. I knew that. He had rung me up. Without putting Volker in the frame, I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much. He put the phone down rather exasperatedly. Like many of the other West German correspondents covering East German affairs, he lived in West Berlin. His ‘dissident sources’ were semi-professional; mine were the neighbours.

  Just how reliable they would turn out to be was another matter. Two days later, on the Saturday afternoon, we piled into the car, me and Jackie plus Volker and a mate of his, and drove the three hours down to Dresden. I had been to the city before, marvelled at the scant remains of its baroque glories nestled along the banks of the curving River Elbe – the seventeenth-century Zwinger palace, designed to be the Versailles of Saxony, was still undergoing a forty-year restoration – and been horrified at the bland, faceless flat-blocks and empty pedestrian zones imposed by the diktat architecture of Socialist Realism in the 1960s (though much of it no worse than what British planners did to Coventry). But the great rubble heap of the Frauenkirche still dominated the town centre, in its own way a more poignant monument to war’s brutal destructiveness than anything conceived as such (its post-1990 rebuilding is a masterpiece of restoration but it has eliminated another memory of horror).

  We parked the car in a side street and walked towards the great mound of charred stone, now liberally dusted with the fine snow that had been falling for several hours. That there was something going on was unmistakeable. Here and there a candle flickered in a glass jar amid the ruins. As we got closer we could make out at least several dozen people milling around, with more slowly gathering. And beyond them, a watching line of several dozen policemen, not interfering but watching both the gathering crowd and each other, as though waiting for a signal. I told Volker to go and join his pals, expecting there to be a gaggle of them at least that he would know. It seemed there wasn’t. At least not at first. Then he spotted a girl and went off to talk to her, although whether it was because he knew her or just fancied her, I was less than certain. I took out my notebook. Immediately two of the policemen took an interest in me.

  One of them came up to me and told me to put it away, there was nothing going on. I looked at him as if he was from Mars, though I knew the truth was that in his eyes I was the Martian: East German press did what they were told. And provincial policemen never encountered any others. I then did something even more unexpected in his eyes: I walked away, mingling with the crowd, now several hundred in number, milling around and over the snowy rubble. Most had the familiar Swords to Ploughshares patch sewn on their jeans or jackets. There were several dozen candles in jam jars placed in sheltered spots amid the heaped ruins. I started asking people why they were there and got the answers I expected, in accents that suggested most of them had travelled to get here: ‘We’re against the missiles.’ ‘No more wars’. It was the sort of thing even the party’s faithful FDJ could be relied upon to trot out, as long as they made clear it was only American missiles in West Germany they wanted no more of. ‘All missiles?’ I asked a couple of people. ‘Including Soviet ones in the GDR?’ I got a cautious nod from one, then a loud enthusiastic, ‘Of course,’ from the girl beside him, pulling her scarf up over her face as she spoke. ‘Absolutely,’ said another, looking over her shoulder. The police had doubled in number and were beginning to form lines that looked like they might at any minute advance.

  I began asking how people had spread the word about gathering here tonight like this. It was only when I noted a remarkable coincidence of answers that the terrible truth began to dawn on me. ‘I heard about it on the television,’ was
the almost unanimous response. Like a cold shiver creeping up my back, I realised what I had done. I had broken the Prime Directive: the old Reuters rule of thumb that we correspondents liked to pretend was taken straight from Star Trek, when we were told ‘to boldly go’ on our five-year missions: no interference with the internal affairs of other civilisations. We were supposed to be reporters, not movers or shakers. We wrote about what went on; we didn’t influence it. And yet that was precisely what I had done. Nearly every one of the young people at this small but still unprecedented ‘spontaneous’ demonstration was here because they had heard West German television say there was going to be an unprecedented spontaneous demonstration. It also explained why there were relatively few local accents in the crowd. Dresden was widely joked about in the rest of East Germany as ‘Tal der Ahnungslosen’, or the Valley of the Clueless, because its geographical situation (in a valley) and distance from the West Berlin transmitters meant it was the only major populated area in East Germany that couldn’t receive West German television.