5 The Picnic

Sopronpuszta, 19th August, 1989.

Lt. Col. Arpad Bella, acting commander of the Hungarian border guard on duty that day, said that he didn't want to be a mass murderer, that he would do the right thing and order his guards to stand aside and let the people pass.

"What I saw on the other side was amazing. There were people who in their panic kept running even further, even though they were on Austrian land. There were people who just sat down on the other side of the border and just either cried... or laughed".


The Pan-Europen Picnic had been organised by members of the growing ant-communist opposition in Hungary as a peaceful event in a field next to the Austrian border near the town of Sopron, to demonstrate an increasing sense of freedom under Glasnost, and to put to the test Gorbachov's affirmation that he 'would not intervene militarily' to prevent cross-border movements of people. It had been agreed that part of the border would be opened for 3 hours to allow 'an ordinary exchange of greetings' between Austrians and Hungarians. What happened, in fact, was that hundreds of East Germans arrived and about 600 of them crossed the border that afternoon.


"What happened attracted enormous attention and set in motion the process which saw the wall fall in Berlin on November 9th ... for the appearance of a hole in the Iron Curtain meant that the curtain in it's entirety became worthless. It was like gigantic dam which suddenly had developed a little hole somewhere. And it was at Sopron where everything really began to crack in all seriousness".

Carl Bildt - Swedish Foreign Minister.

4 The Curtain.

We had cut down from Vienna towards the border at Sopronpuzta, about 80 kilometres west of the main Vienna - Budapest highway, where we passed unhindered through the Austrian checkpoint.

Unlike others parts of the border between east and west, the narrower two kilometre wide no-man's land here was cultivated soil, but still enclosed by parallel lines of barbed wire fencing, punctuated by flimsy looking watchtowers, stretching away across the fields and hills like a broadly painted green line. We drove slowly and tentatively across it towards the Hungarian control.                            

Two guards got up from the bench outside their office, slung Kalashnikovs across their backs and stood waiting for us.  It had been a long hot day, their ties and jackets hung limply as if they too were exhausted. Across the evening sky a low sun continued to spread unrelenting heat, and the bronzed faces of the young men glistened.  Zuzana's newly acquired dark blue and gold British passport was examined with particular interest before being handed to a more senior looking man, who took it away to an inner office. Perhaps phone calls were made. We waited, trying to appear as relaxed as possible. Zuzana lit a cigarette. One of the guards casually examined the camper van with seemingly little interest other than to pass amused comments to his colleague about the right hand drive steering wheel, the small kitchen fittings, the sink, the kettle...

Our journey east may have ended at this point had the passport examination resulted in a refusal for Zuzana. This was her first time back to the Curtain she had fled through from Prague seven years before. Her surname, Bluhova, did not go unnoticed or unchecked. We waited half an hour.

"She left and now she comes back for a holiday" muttered one guard to another as he handed over the passports, unaware of Zuzana's knowledge of their language. We politely thanked them and drove slowly beneath the lifting barrier, saying nothing for a while as I accelerated along the empty road. Zuzana lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and muttered: "Little shits. Little... fucking... shits."

3 Simon

Appropriately enough the towers began to appear on the horizon like a pair of dunce's caps and grew taller as we cruised along in the van towards them. They were still some distance away, having been for some time the tallest man made structures in the world, but Cologne Cathedral's majestic spires were not a welcome site. 'Cologne is north,' I said. 'We're supposed to be going south towards Munich.'

The autobhan held this northbound grip for half an hour until a side exit eventually released us, and then it was a matter of finding a route back to the southbound. We lost about two hours to this incompetence.

We ran south through Franconia as quickly as the old van would move, towards Munich, Austria, and the Iron Curtain, stopping off for a few days in Vienna with relatives of Zuzana's. While there, she took me to meet a family friend, who she referred to only as 'Simon'.  She said nothing about Simon beforehand only that she'd known him since her childhood, and that he was a close friend of her mother's. We would have little time, he was usually very busy and we in any case needed to leave Vienna.

We stepped into an old building not far from St Stephen's Cathedral, where Simon's office was situated at the far end of a first floor corridor. Small paintings hung on both walls, each one individually concealed behind it's own small curtain. A secretary nodded a greeting from her desk as we passed a side office who's walls were lined from floor to ceiling with files, as was Simon's own office.

Simon was a thick set, late middle aged man, balding, with a mustache and large friendly eyes. We chatted about the journey, he asked after Zuzana's mother, and about life in London. Then it was time to leave. "Are they paintings?" I asked, indicating the small curtains as we walked slowly along the corridor. "Why are they concealed?" "Well," said Simon, smiling and reaching to pull one of the curtains back, "it's not a happy subject for the people who work here to have in view all day, but take a look for yourself."

I had seen the nightmarish documentary films and photographs, but not the subject in painting before and it came as a shock. Here were the now familiar shapes of emaciated humans, barbed wire fencing and wooden huts of a concentration camp, but unlike the brief immediacy of photography there was a more intimate quality to much of what I was looking at, of small details of dress and anatomy, colour of skin, of environment, which only the concentrated effort of looking and rendering over a period of time can convey. It seemed grotesquely misplaced to think of some of the portraits of gaunt, hollow eyed faces as beautiful. "They made art materials out of whatever they could," said Simon, drawing a curtain back across a painting, "- pigments out the earth and charcoal, hair for brushes..."

Out in the street I turned to Zuzana. "What does Simon actually do?" I asked.  She looked at me incredulously. "You don't know what Simon Wiesenthal does? " she said. She hadn't mentioned his sir-name before.

                                                      Simon Wiesenthal 1908 - 2005

"The tracking down of Nazi criminals is, in point of fact, Wiesenthal’s lesser merit; a more important function, for at least the past thirty years, has been the fact that his persistent writing of letters has prevented Austrian and German authorities from allowing the prosecution of Nazi criminals to be quietly shelved."

(Peter Michael Lingens, former staff member of the Documentation Center. “In Lieu of a Self-Portrait”. In Simon Wiesenthal: Justice Not Vengeance. New York: George Weidenfeld, 1989. p. 19.)

2 London to Budapest 1979

Somewhere now lost is a photograph of a house-fly sitting on a piece of banana peel. The peel rests on the small formica worktop of a VW camper-van's kitchen unit where it and the fly stayed throughout the journey from London to Budapest. After Zuzana and I first noticed this extra little passenger it was assumed that the stowaway would disappear as soon as the door was next opened.  But it stayed, all the way. No matter how often or how long the sliding side door or the windows remained opened when we parked the fly remained somewhere in the van. Sometimes it was uncertain if the fly had left or not until some miles down the road it would appear on the dashboard or somewhere. And so we called it 'Mucha', Czech for 'fly', and began to assume it had adopted us, this small black dot of a presence, even checking if Mucha was still aboard when closing the doors and resuming our journey. It always was.

Life for an inexperienced English driver on the continent is made easier by being channelled onto the  motorway on the 'other' side of the road as soon as you roll off the ferry. There is no immediate problem with unfamiliar road layouts or signage or vehicles driving threateningly towards you, and so the journey begins in relative comfort for the nervous system. We travelled across Belgium towards Germany and Cologne, and then to Geissen where Zuzana Bluhova and I would spend the night with friends before carrying on south towards Austria.

Things were not difficult. Leaving the autobahn for the first time and arriving soon after in the mid-sized university town of Geissen on a quiet evening meant negotiating an unfamiliar environment against little traffic and with few mistakes, perhaps the occasional momentary turn onto the wrong side of the road or temptation to travel clockwise around an island, but nothing which got me into trouble either with other road users or the law. As we parked I congratulated myself on a successful baptism into the ways of continental road using, little realizing what fires of automotive hell the cosseting smoothness of the autobahns was ushering me towards.

1 A hard, merciless light

The photograph shows a young woman, relaxed, reading a journal in front of a large window in what can only be some kind of institution. She sits next to a small table, in the foreground are more journals or newspapers, and a hard chair. It has the appearance of a reading room or part of a library. There is a modern feeling about the room, which is airy, and full of light. 

The photograph was taken in the student common room at the Dessau Bauhaus, Germany, in 1930. The student, Irena Bluhova, would go on to become a co-founder of the Communist Party of Slovakia and an internationally known photographer in the 'Worker Photography Movement'. 

The WPM lasted from 1926 until 1939, starting in Germany and the USSR, and spreading across Europe and America.  The movement promoted the depiction of proletariat life and working conditions. Communist affiliated groups of amateur worker-photographers were exhorted to depict 'in a hard, merciless light' the 'iniquities and social ills of capitalism'.

'Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary class struggle'.

In 1972, aged 68, Irena Bluhova, along with a group of other reformist intellectuals, was briefly arrested at her home in Bratislava. By 1979 her daughter Zuzana, a political refugee living in London, had decided to ensure the safety of her mother's negatives archive by having them spirited out of Czechoslovakia to the west.

106 Share

7 The Threat of Pigeon-fanciers

I reached Daniel K's doorstep in one of the dismally grey tower-blocked suburbs of Prague so typical of East-Central Europe - it could as well have been Warsaw or Poznan or Bratislava -  after the usual dance, getting on one tram, getting off a stop or two down the line and getting on another traveling in the opposite direction. Who knows, Daniel's apartment may well have been under surveillance in any case but better to be sure of one's own interests.

In another part of the city, on the fourth floor of an elegant Old Town building overlooking the Vltava, representatives of the State would be sitting outside the door of the playwright and former prisoner Vaclav Havel, where they would examine papers, passports, and register any visitors having the temerity to be sociable.

At that time there was no need to explain what people with doctorates were doing laboring on building sites, why university professors were cleaning windows or stoking boilers. Or why former officials were sweeping floors.  Havel had at some time earned a living rolling barrels in a brewery. Daniel, normally a journalist, cleaned windows.

Havel would become the country's President.  

Daniel would become it's Ambassador to Israel. 

'I saw Prečan,' Daniel told me as he placed a bowl of pasta on the table in front of me. 'You know, the historian. He was working as cloakroom attendant in restaurant. He seemed to be quite good at it, I got some feeling he was actually enjoying it.'
'Are you being watched here?' I asked.
'Well,' said Daniel, looking towards the curtained window,' there are always Tatras around, but who knows really?'

The Tatra 613, vehicle of choice for all secret police.

'Actually I heard that the the pigeon-fanciers club is under surveillance, and you know what a threat to the system they are. No joking, this is true.' A wide grin spread across his black-bearded face. 'All that shit everywhere, how is totalitarianism supposed to function efficiently!'

While we were still eating, there was a knock at the door. Daniel placed his eye against the spyhole, and then said quietly... 'Jan.' Turning to me he said 'Listen, be careful what you say in front of this guy, ok?'
Jan, a neighbor, had called by, it appeared, to return a record. He was a young man in his twenties, ebullient, delighted to meet a new face, especially one from the west. Did I like jazz? Who were my favorite musicians? Had I seen them live? Did I know this or that recording? Would I like to see his collection of records?

Daniel shrugged. 'Actually, he wants you to see his fishpond.'
'Fishpond?'
'He's got a fishpond in his living room,' said Daniel wearily.

And so he had. Jan's apartment was two doors away. He led me into his living room and sure enough, framed by four heavy beams of wood with a sheet of plastic in support, with pebbles and sand forming a floor and a small waterfall cascading down across some rocks, there in the middle of his room was a fishpond. Four or five goldfish moved contentedly about.

I stayed as short a time as possible in Jan's company, before the discussion moved away from Chick Corea's collaboration with Gary Burton and onto my collaboration with his neighbor Daniel the dissident.


                                                         *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *


Daniel stared at me in disbelief. 'You'll never get anywhere near him! The road will be full of fucking Tatras!'
'All I want to do' I said, 'is drop this into his letter box. If it's big enough.' I stood holding out the half bottle of Irish single malt whisky. 'If there's nobody watching of course.'

But of course there was someone watching. I had taken a taxi from the city center, for the airport, and asked the driver to go via the short road on the outskirts of Prague, where Seifert lived, to drop me at one end and wait for me at the other while I walked along past Seifert's large house. In front of it was a high mesh fence but with no sign of a post box set into it or behind, nothing which even resembled a post box. Where, I wondered, did he receive mail? But I didn't stop, I just kept walking as if I had no interest in the property because parked across the road was no black Tatra 613 with a couple of bored SB security men coating the interior with another layer of nicotine, but a police car.

'Do you like Irish whisky?' I asked the taxi driver as we approached the airport.
'I don't care which country it's from!' he said laughing. As I slipped out of the taxi I left the bottle on the back seat without saying anything and he drove off, stopping suddenly a few yards on, his door flying open.
'Hey man! Hey thanks, man!' he called, holding up the bottle - the famous Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, Nobel Laureate's bottle.

When a man like me travels far from home he wants to go back with something in his pocket.
Franz Kafka - The Castle

I had my cobblestone.

6 the Kafka stone

They used to say that 'the air swirled with the molecules of suspicion.'

I had climbed the steps to Castle Square for the first time a year previously and then, as now, it lay empty but for a single uniformed figure standing in front of a sentry box on the far side, in front of the building. On that first occasion, struck by the novelty of being alone but for a communist soldier facing me with a gun at his side, a hundred meters or so away, I had walked steadily towards him. The response had been no more than to see him pull to attention, snapping his weapon to his side, before I was halfway across, while he continued to look at me impassively. I admit, the pace of my heart as well as the rhythm of my step, changed momentarily. I stopped a few yards in front of him and nodded. Come on, it's just us two, I thought, here alone on the square on a pleasant evening, you might as well acknowledge a fellow solitary, duty or not.  But evidently satisfied that I was a mere wanderer with no apparent intent to storm the castle, his gaze moved away from mine to somewhere beyond the square. He remained firmly, unflinchingly, at attention. Your commanding officer would be proud, I thought.

This time I walked towards the side of the square, around to the far side, the sentry's eyes following me until he too lost interest. A different face, indifferent to me. I wanted to say to him something about a young man, blonde hair, green jacket over shoulder - to 'let him have a couple of rounds'.  I passed by the castle and headed towards the tree-lined avenues beyond and the cathedral precincts.

For all I knew, young green-jacket was no more interested in my perambulations than anyone else would have been, if they'd been a visitor to the city. In any case he had a Scandinavian look about him, his blondness rendering him fairly noticeable. In the shadowed avenues beyond the cathedral he would, possibly, glow like a torch. But below the castle square had been the last I saw of him. In the late evening the trees offered an oasis of cool at the end of a stifling day and I lingered, indulging my sense of assurance before moving on, driven back towards the city by hunger and the need for a number 24 tram.

Situated within the castle and cathedral precincts, Golden Lane was originally built to house the Castle's marksmen, and later, it's craftsmen. Between 1916 and 1917 number 22 was rented by Franz Kafka's sister Ottla for him to work in.


I had done my own Kafka tour of Prague on a previous occasion, searching out views of his various apartments, the insurance building where he worked, taking walks through the same vaulted archways and twisting alleys that he, man and boy, would have taken. On a building in Maiselova Street in the Old Town there is a black bronze plaque commemorating Kafka's birthplace, a three dimensional portrait, rather too gaunt. In the entrance to Strašnice cemetery, a large board indicates, black letters on white, the way to the grave of 'DR FRANZ KAFKA'. It came as a surprise to find this obvious, tangible evidence of a writer who's work was yet still banned.

There is a small plaque, too, on the wall of 22 Golden Lane. Close to the house, work had been done on setting drains and several discarded cobblestones lay nearby. I knelt and picked up one of the small black granite cubes so typical of Prague's old roads and pavements and thought how likely it was that Kafka himself would have stepped on it, to and from the house. I slipped it into my pocket. I would, I thought, take something away with me, if not a filmed acceptance speech by the newly appointed Nobel Laureate for Literature, then at least a small part of Prague upon which his illustrious but proscribed forbear might very well have trodden.

And then, with my hand in my pocket,  I remembered the Irish whisky. Seifert's whisky.