Dartblog

In looking at stories on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the cratering of communism, I came across two wonderful accounts by Michael Meyer, who was Newsweek’s bureau chief in Eastern Europe in 1989. He seems to have a reporter’s nose for the small details of history, which often are the most telling.

One involves an East German border guard commander who concisely expressed the fatigue of his failed régime; he simply opened the barriers between East and West when the yelling got too loud:

The scene was Checkpoint Charlie, the famous border crossing in the heart of divided Berlin. A heaving crowd of East Germans faced a thin line of Volkspolitzei, nervously fingering their weapons. The standoff had just entered its fourth hour. “Open up! Open up!” the people cried out. Past the police and their guard dogs, past the watchtower and barbed wire of the infamous death strip, on the other side of the grim-gray Berlin Wall, came the answering call from an equally boisterous mob of West Germans: “Come over! Come over!”

In his glass booth, the captain of the border guard once again put down his phone [after repeated failing to get through to his superiors]. He stood rock-still. Perhaps he had just been informed that the Bornholmerstrasse crossing to the north had moments earlier opened its barriers, besieged by some 20,000 people. Perhaps he came to his own decision. Maybe he was simply fed up. Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “Why not?”

“Alles auf!” he ordered. “Open up,” and the gates swung wide. With a great roar the crowds surged forward…

The other account tells the story of Hungary’s reform Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth and the manner in which Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev reassured him that his liberalizing country would not be invaded, despite the imprecations of the other Warsaw Pact leaders:

Nemeth had been in office for only seven months. This was his first Warsaw Pact summit. He was nervous, but he knew his enemies would act only with Soviet support. The man who could give it sat roughly opposite him, 30 feet away on the other side of a large rectangle of flag-draped conference tables. As Ceausescu and the others ranted on, calling for armed intervention in Hungary, Nemeth glanced across at the Soviet leader. Their eyes met, and Gorbachev … winked.

“This happened at least four or five times,” Nemeth later told me. “Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really a wink. It was more a look, a bemused twinkle. Each time he smiled at me, with his eyes, it was as if Gorbachev were saying, ‘Don’t worry. These people are idiots. Pay no attention.’ ” And so he didn’t. As the dogs of the Warsaw Pact brayed for his head, Nemeth went outside to smoke a cigarette.

In our own lives, we have moments when small (or large) acts of courage can affect the people around us. Do we seize them, or do we succumb to the pressures to do the expected? Please ask yourself this question every day.