Markus Rindt

I was sitting in the classroom and my class teacher said (I could’ve been about eight or nine, that was back in Magdeburg): “Tell me children, did you also see the broadcast yesterday? Where they actually said, on the Western television, that here in the GDR, in our beautiful country, we’re prisoners? Look outside! Are you in prison? Just look out the window!” And of course as a class we responded: “No, what a nerve! Of course we’re not in prison! What? They’re saying that are they?” And that shows you the propaganda at work, it was pretty easy to say: “Of course you’re free, you can run outside, of course you’re not in prison.” That was in primary school, later things were a little more subtle, for instance there were discussions about Communism during civics class, one time I asked the teacher: “Could you please explain, if we have Socialism now, when are we going to have Communism? When will Communism start? And how long will it last?” And she said: “Well, about a thousand years?” That seemed like an odd thing to say. They were basically telling us that when we were much better off in the East, much better off, when full Communism had been implemented and everyone was doing well, and everyone had the same, and we were better off than people in the West, then we’d open the borders, then we would be able to leave and then people would come here from the West. No one would leave because we would be better off here! They basically said we’d have to have a little patience. But a thousand years? Now that is perhaps a bit too long to wait.

Tržiště, that street running up the hill. That was completely blocked off, from the left to the right there was a line of armed soldiers. It was frightening, it was obvious they didn’t want us to come through. But from the other side were crowds of people, they spread out everywhere. There were tram tracks between us and that street. More and more people kept coming in, filling up the space. We stood there for quite a while and nobody had the courage to do anything else, carry on. We didn’t know if they would start firing or what would happen. Suddenly one father with his wife and two children started out directly towards the soldiers. We all held our breath and watched to see what would happen. And then the soldiers moved a bit to allow them to get through. At that moment, as if you’d fired a starting gun, everyone started moving. The soldiers just spread out, broke up their cordon and we all came through and up the street, let the crowd carry us and thought we would finally be allowed to the embassy. But there was a huge crowd of people in front of the embassy.