Refugees The Great Escape

By Jill Smolowe

Historic moments are often tame and unspontaneous affairs, played out in marble halls amid the flutter of flags and the trumpeting of national anthems. Pen is put to treaty, palm grasps palm in a handshake of newfound understanding and -- pop! -- a burst of flashbulbs records the moment for posterity. But as the cold war winds down, history is offering up startling new images that bear none of the hallmarks of traditional statesmanship. Last week history was made amid the flutter of colorful balloons, the sputtering of rattletrap Trabants and Wartburgs and -- pop! -- the burst of champagne corks. It was the Great Trek Westward, and as East Germans headed for new lives in West Germany, the world witnessed a unique spectacle: an East European country defying its Warsaw Pact brethren and openly collaborating with the West to aid and abet refugees in their flight to freedom.

The dramatic stampede of more than 14,000 East Germans into West Germany last week followed Hungary's decision to grant the refugees passage across its border with Austria. The ensuing crush marked the largest mass exodus from behind the Iron Curtain since the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961. True, the flow was a trickle compared with the hemorrhage of 3 million East Germans to the West between 1949 and 1961. But this time there was the remarkable sight of Hungary bucking its Communist ally to assist the East German refugees in their quest to begin new lives in a capitalist nation. To open its borders, Budapest suspended key paragraphs of a 1969 bilateral treaty between Hungary and East Germany that forbids the unauthorized passage of citizens of either country into third countries. Budapest's bold maneuver provided the West with a vivid glimpse of fractures within the Warsaw Pact -- and raised unnerving questions about the refugee tide that might ensue if the Iron Curtain was completely dismantled.

East Germany responded to the crisis with maximal rhetoric and minimal action. It trained much of the heat on West Germany, charging it with an "attempt to destabilize" East Germany. But the East German media also raged against Hungary, accusing it of "trading human lives for pieces of silver," a pointed suggestion that Hungary had swapped the refugees for hard West German currency. Two days after the border was thrown open, East Germany charged that Hungary was in "clear violation of legal treaties" and demanded that it stop letting the refugees through. Budapest angrily dismissed the charges and asserted that it was not willing to become a "refugee camp" for East Germany's problem. Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn rejected the charges of payments from West Germany as "unacceptable and insulting," then hinted that East Germany might be guilty of the same. Horn had a point: since 1961, East Germany has demanded cash from West Germany before granting legal exit permits for many of its citizens. This year alone, Bonn is expected to pay East Berlin $200 million for refugee resettlement. For all of Hungary's righteous indignation, however, it is believed that quiet promises were made by Bonn that will translate into generous aid.

The decision to open the border came only after a tortuous debate within the Central Committee of the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. Hard- liners argued that existing agreements with other socialist states must be upheld, while reformers said it was more important to meet international obligations, among them the 1975 Helsinki agreements and the U.N. convention on refugees. Imre Pozsgay, the party's pre-eminent reformer, told TIME, "We took the step that embraced the higher of the principles involved, that of human rights."

Most of Eastern Europe followed the lead of Moscow, which attempted to avoid intra-alliance finger pointing and instead blamed Bonn. As for Hungary, the Soviets displayed cautious sympathy. In an interview with the BBC, Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov said that Hungary was "in a Catch-22 situation. On the one hand, it had an agreement with the ((German Democratic Republic)) not to allow G.D.R. citizens to travel to a third country. On the other hand, it had all these people there. It was a very difficult, very unusual situation."

In truth, it was the Soviet Union that was in a very difficult and very unusual situation. Hungary, along with Poland, is the most enthusiastic East- bloc supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. Moreover, Gorbachev has pledged noninterference in East European affairs. At the same time, Gorbachev does not want to preside over the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. Moscow's unease may in part explain the arrival of Soviet Politburo Member Yegor Ligachev in East Berlin last week. Moscow said the trip was long planned, but there was little doubt that the presence of Ligachev, a hard-liner known for his resistance to Gorbachev's reforms, could not help reassuring intransigent East Germany that its ties with Moscow remained solid. If East Germany was also quietly being urged to adopt a more flexible posture, Ligachev was the man to deliver the message.

The diplomatic ballet, however, was a mere sideshow to the drama of the border crossings. When the order came from Budapest at midnight last Sunday, Hungarian border guards blocking the 600-yard crossing at Hegyeshalom to the Austrian town of Nickelsdorf smiled and began to wave the refugees through. Across they came, on foot and bicycles, in German Wartburgs and Czech Skodas. Some drivers paused to put black tape over the first D and the R on their DDR vehicle-identification stickers, leaving a single D for Deutschland. "What a Monday!" cried an Austrian radio newscaster. "Boris Becker wins the U.S. Open, and lots of D.D.R. citizens win the Hungarian Open!"

Most moved on quickly, eager to complete the 250-mile trek across Austria to their new homeland. Cries of "Free at last!" filled the air as newcomers leaped from their vehicles to kiss the West German asphalt. In Passau, volunteers passed out candy and fruit to sleepy-eyed children, who must have thought they had awakened in the midst of a carnival. "I came for her," said a young father, hoisting his daughter into his arms. "She deserves more than a life in East Germany." The first signs were promising. Because Bonn acknowledges only one German citizenship, the refugees were automatically recognized as citizens and as such were showered with gifts and benefits. Mountains of donated clothes piled up at the reception camps, and the refugees received a minimum of $125 to cover immediate expenses. As citizens, the refugees were also entitled to unemployment payments.

But most are unlikely to be on the dole for long. Potential employers quickly descended on the camps, seeking to hire everyone from welders and machinists to carpenters, bakers and locksmiths. In the Schoppingen area near the Dutch border, there were 5,000 job proposals chasing just 1,500 refugees. "I am swimming in offers," said Dennis Kiesewalter, 22, a roofer. "At home I was told about unemployment here." The outpouring of jobs probably startled some West Germans as well; the unemployment rate currently stands at almost 7%. The fact is, however, that the East Germans offer employers certain advantages that most natives do not. The newcomers, by and large, are mobile, are accustomed to working harder than many West Germans and are not finicky about getting their hands dirty.

They are also on average far younger than the East Germans who beat a path to West Germany's door in the past. According to polls conducted for the Ministry for Intra-German Relations, more than half of the refugees are under 30, and only 17% are over 40. Surveys showed that fully 86% have vocational or professional training, and an equal number held down professional jobs in East Germany. All of those polled owned television sets back home, almost two- thirds owned private cars, and 15% had weekend homes.

Clearly, most of the new flood of refugees are not compelled westward by economic distress. True, the consumer offerings in West Germany far outstrip what is available back home, but East Germany enjoys the best living standard of any East European country. Most of the refugees, however, define a better life in terms that cannot be measured in deutsche marks. Of those polled, almost three-quarters said they were driven by the lack of freedom of expression and travel. Almost as many said they wanted more personal responsibility for their own destiny. As Heide Zitzmann, 37, a schoolteacher, summed it up, "I felt buried alive."

Mixed in, largely unnoticed, among the thousands of East Germans making the trek westward was a handful of Rumanians and Soviets. That trickle could portend problems for all of Europe. While the Germans are a special case with their historic claims to a single nationhood, other East Europeans are eyeing Hungary's hole in the Iron Curtain and fantasizing about life on the other side.

Hungary has made plain that its opening for the East Germans is a "unique step" and does not extend to others. But the increasing porousness of the East-West border coincides with the disintegration of the economies of most of Eastern Europe, and it does not require much imagination to foresee that others might try to crash borders. "If our perestroika succeeds and theirs fails," warns a top French foreign-policy adviser, referring to Western Europe's plans for a single market by the end of 1992, "then it will not just be the East Germans scrambling to get out." Precisely such a prospect is turning immigration into a hot political issue in many European countries, and will enable xenophobic parties like France's National Front and West Germany's Republican Party to climb still further in the polls. The problem is , compounded by the European Community plans for 1992, which will ease border travel throughout Western Europe.

Compassion is unlikely to run very high. "Until recently, refugees from Eastern Europe could play the persecution card," says a senior E.C. official. "But with the political reforms that have taken place in Poland and Hungary, it is going to be harder for refugees to meet the test." The U.S. is already facing up to that question now as Congress prods the Bush Administration to up its proposed annual quota of 50,000 Soviet Jewish refugees. Last week Jewel Lafontant, the U.S. coordinator for refugee affairs, raised a storm when she suggested that those denied U.S. entry could "always go to Israel or return to Russia. In these days of glasnost, that's not an impossible thing."

Moreover, if the reforms now being undertaken in Eastern Europe are going to stick, it is in no one's interest to drain these countries of their best and brightest. As former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt wrote last week in Die Zeit, "We shouldn't invite the G.D.R. to bleed itself out."

The longer-term challenge for Eastern Europe will be to create economic as well as political conditions that will encourage its citizens to remain at home. In the shorter term, however, Hungary has found a temporary solution to an immediate problem. It remains unclear how long that option will remain. For the moment, Budapest seems inclined to allow its border with Austria to stay open at least another few weeks. If the tide continues, East Germany may tighten up on its citizens' travel to Hungary, and Hungary itself may begin to impose visa requirements on visitors. In the meantime, history is being made at the border crossing at Hegyeshalom.

With reporting by John Borrell/Budapest, William Mader/London and William Rademaekers/Bonn