Iron Curtain (77 page)

Eventually, the fuss over the Lublin miracle died down. But it was not the only such event in Stalinist Europe. In the Hungarian village of
Fallóskút, two years earlier, a young woman named Klára ran away from a violent husband, spent the night in the fields, and had a dream in which the Virgin Mary told her to look for a spring. She found the spring, and then had a second dream, in which the Virgin Mary told her to build a chapel. Despite her poverty, “belief would be enough” to pay for the chapel, according to the Virgin, and so it proved. Klára convinced others to help, and the chapel was erected beside the spring at the end of 1948. A priest came to inaugurate the building.

Even though the fearful episcopate refused to recognize the miracle, the Virgin nevertheless appeared to Klára several times again in 1949, after which she was sent to a psychiatric hospital and given electric shock treatment. She was released, but then sent back to the hospital once more in 1952 and diagnosed as schizophrenic. In the meantime, many others began to support the chapel, including Klára’s repentant husband. Later, in the 1970s, she made two trips to the
Vatican in an attempt to secure papal recognition for the miracle. Eventually recognition was granted, though only after her death in 1985.
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Fallóskút never attracted the crowds that briefly deluged Lublin cathedral. But the chapel eventually came to play a special role in Hungarian
Gypsy culture. These most passive of all regime opponents demonstrated their belief by quietly making their way to Klára’s source, and by quietly observing the miracles the holy water wrought. Several patients with eye trouble were cured by the water. A mute boy was said to have begun to speak. No one who came to pray at the chapel had to say a word about politics, communism, democracy, or opposition. But everyone who came to Fallóskút understood why they were there and why others were not.

Miracles, pilgrimages, and prayer were not the only form of passive opposition the church could offer. However curtailed, persecuted, and oppressed, religious institutions did continue to exist during High Stalinism. However pressured or threatened, not every priest was “patriotic” either, and not every Catholic intellectual was in search of a public career. Those church authorities who were willing to operate discreetly were even able to create unusual living and working arrangements for people who wanted nothing to do with communism at all. Precisely that sort of odd arrangement helped
Halina Bortnowska survive High Stalinism with her conscience intact.

Bortnowska, the daughter of a teacher who taught her to “take life seriously,” was thirteen when the war ended. She and her mother had escaped from Warsaw during the uprising, and made their way to Toruń. In the spring of 1945 Bortnowska returned to school. Classes had resumed spontaneously. There was no order from above: teachers simply began teaching again, and the children simply wanted to learn. The teachers were the same ones as before the war, and they taught in the same way, using the same textbooks. Not everything was absolutely normal. In May, Bortnowska remembered, or perhaps June, a rumor spread that Russian soldiers were coming to deport Polish children. The teachers sent everyone home from school. But it was a false rumor, and things continued, at least for a time.

Bortnowska’s Scouting troop resumed spontaneously too. Led by several young woman who had been part of the Szare Szeregi, the Home Army Scouts, the troop set out to make itself useful. They organized aid for refugees then arriving from the east, assisted orphans and children who had been displaced. They behaved as they wanted, and answered to no higher authorities, despite some of the threatening signs around them.

In 1948, things changed. The school director was replaced, and many
of the teachers left as well. The Scout movement in Warsaw was taken over by the Union of Polish Youth leaders, pressure came from above to conform, and the young women instructors decided to disband their troop. “Scouts can’t exist in a dishonest organization,” they told Bortnowska and her friends. In their case, no one thought of forming a secret or conspiratorial troop: “We understood that there was no point.” Bortnowska looked for other outlets. She managed to join Sodalicja Mariańska, a Catholic student group, on the day before it was disbanded. She was too late to work with Caritas as well.

Frustrated, but still determined to stick to her family’s principles and her own Catholic ideals, Bortnowska sought other small outlets for rebellion. A turning point came when she and a friend were asked to sign the Stockholm Appeal, one of the many peace petitions that had gone around the school. They signed—and then thought better of it. They went to the school director and asked for their names to be removed. Those who had managed not to sign in the first place went unnoticed. But Bortnowska and her friend, then in their final year of secondary school, “caused a fuss, and attracted attention to ourselves … the whole town was talking about it.” With that kind of black mark on their records, the possibility of higher education suddenly evaporated for both of them.

She could have gone to work at a factory, and she thought about doing so. But because Bortnowska had friends within religious institutions, there was one more option. She entered the Catholic Institute in Wrocław, and began to study to become a
katechetka
, a teacher of religion in elementary schools. The Catholic Institute, despite its imposing name, was in fact a temporary, unofficial institution, recognized by nobody except the church. Soon after its founding in the city of Wrocław, the institute’s buildings were confiscated and it moved to shabby rural premises near the town of Olsztyn.

At the institute, the students studied and taught at the same time. They survived off money from local parishes, free meals from grateful parents, and food donations from churchgoers. They cooked for themselves and cleaned for themselves. They stayed out of the way. “We didn’t exist, from the point of view of the authorities,” Bortnowska recalled. There was still enough administrative chaos, especially in the former German territories, for them to remain under the radar.

Bortnowska remained at the Catholic Institute until 1956, when things began to loosen up and she was able to apply to a real university and get a
real degree. But for six years, she survived in communist Poland and did not collaborate. During that time she taught the rudiments of religion to schoolchildren, and had enough to eat and somewhere to sleep. She did not pose a threat to the regime, and the regime probably took no interest in her. She played no public role and took no political positions. She had no children and no family, and thus did not have to worry about ensuring their future. Her mother was able to look after herself.

Asked, more than half a century later, whether she’d been afraid during that time, she shrugged. Yes and no, she said. “It’s impossible to be afraid all the time. A person gets used to it, you stop paying attention.” And so, hidden in the countryside, she did.
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For those who could not or would not collaborate, for those unable to find shelter within the church or take comfort in humor, there was one, final, dramatic option: escape.

In this, the East
Germans had it easiest. Poles who left Poland or Hungarians who left Hungary left not just their homes and families but their language and culture. For them, to leave the country was to become forever a refugee. After 1949, passport regimes across Eastern Europe were strengthened and borders reinforced, which made even this heartbreaking choice more risky and difficult, since anyone caught crossing the border risked arrest and imprisonment. According to Interior Ministry statistics, only 9,360 Poles crossed the Polish border for any reason in 1951, of whom only 1,980 were traveling to capitalist countries.
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For Germans the same choice could be very difficult, especially for those who owned property or had family in the East. But it was not quite so dramatic. West Germany was still Germany, after all, and the national language was still German. The logistics were easier too. Unlike the Poles, who had to find a way across East Germany, Czechoslovakia, or the Baltic Sea to the West, Germans who wanted to leave East Germany in the 1950s had only, in theory, to cross the border into the West.

This apparently simple task did become more complicated as time went on. In the early days, the obstacles were often on the western side of the border. Because the flow of refugees was almost entirely from East to West from the very beginning, the
U.S. Army in Bavaria and the
British Army in northern Germany initially tried to slow it down. Fearing it would be
overwhelmed by large numbers of refugees, the U.S. Army actually began defending the borders of its
occupation zone in March 1945, controlling who could and could not enter. Though these efforts weren’t particularly successful—refugees still crossed through forests or found their away around border posts with the help of smugglers and bribable Soviet soldiers—they did help set a precedent. In due course all of the Allied armies in Germany set up border posts and roadblocks, monitored routes leading in and out of their respective zones, and required those crossing “internal” German borders to carry passes and visas.
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Inevitably, there began to be border “incidents”—Soviet soldiers shooting into the American zone and vice versa—as well as arguments over where, exactly, the new East–West German border was supposed to be. Nineteenth-century stone markers, which could be stealthily moved at night, became a focus of contention, and a number of towns in the Soviet zone applied to be transferred to the American zone.
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The Red Army began to establish what would later become a no-man’s-land, an area along the border where no one was allowed to live. Later, whole villages in these border areas would be evacuated. A series of Allied negotiations were held to discuss travel problems, and various commissions were set up to find the answers. Rules were created to govern the issuance of passes and permits.

All the while, Germans kept moving from East to West. Between October 1945 and June 1946 some 1.6 million people crossed into the American and British zones from the Soviet zone. By June 1946, the Red Army, not the American army, was demanding a ban on interzonal travel, and American soldiers, not Red Army soldiers, were helping Germans sneak across (by dressing up German women in American uniforms, among other things, a trick that was apparently not hard to see through).
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From 1949, the West German authorities also stopped treating people arriving from the East as illegal immigrants. Instead, they came to be regarded as political refugees and victims of communist oppression. They received places in refugee camps and help in finding housing and work. In accordance with these changes, the Soviet authorities also began to enforce stricter controls, sending Red Army troops to patrol their border and build ditches, fences, and barriers.

Berlin remained the exception. Although the city lay inside the Soviet zone, it was not easy to set up an enforceable “border” within it (though the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 would eventually prove that it was
possible). More importantly, the USSR did not at first want the city’s division to become official. The Soviet authorities preferred
Berlin to remain unified, albeit anchored securely in the East. This anomaly quickly created another odd dynamic, as East Germans began flocking to East Berlin in order to cross the border into West Berlin, and to make their way from there to West Germany by train or air. The mystery and intrigue of Berlin, so attractive to spy novelists and filmmakers, date from this era, when Berlin was the gateway to freedom.

The Berlin blockade of 1948–49 (described in
Chapter 11
) was designed to end this flow of people, as well as to persuade the Western Allies to abandon the western part of the city. Though the blockade failed in that latter task, the reinforcement of the border within the city did make it more difficult for Berliners to cross. Border police, ostensibly looking for black marketeers, monitored all forms of transportation, checking passports and visas, sometimes arresting would-be refugees.

The real clampdown came in 1952, after the East German government created a special commission to deal with the problem of those “fleeing the Republic.” Naturally, their solutions included propaganda—denunciations of the Western spies who enticed Easterners across the border with false promises of riches—as well as promises of better employment and housing for anyone who came back. The secret police began to collect information about people who had left, the better to understand their motives. Eventually, all remaining crossings along the East–West German border were closed to ordinary traffic, including as many in Berlin as feasible. It was at this point that the East German police and the Red Army began to monitor and block the roads into East Berlin from East Germany as well.

Yet still people fled. Despite all of the border controls, the guns, and the tanks, despite the risk of arrest or capture, nearly 200,000 people—197,788 to be precise—left East Germany for the West in 1950. In 1952, after the border had been newly fortified, the number dropped only slightly, to 182,393. Even then it began to pick up again, and would hover around 200,000 annually until the construction of the Berlin Wall halted the traffic. In total, 3.5 million people, out of a population of 18 million, are thought to have left East Germany between 1945 and 1961.
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Of these 3.5 million, some might have become the regime’s opponents if they had stayed. Ernst Benda, the young Christian Democratic activist who
slipped over the border after receiving an odd phone message, went on to become a legal scholar, an early supporter of the Free University of West Berlin, and eventually president of the West German Supreme Court.
Gisela Gneist, imprisoned in Sachsenhausen for founding a democratic youth group at the age of fifteen, crossed the border after her release. Decades later she helped create the memorial to Soviet prisoners at that camp.
Gerhard Finn, arrested as a teenage “Werewolf,” crossed the border and threw himself into the anticommunist movement in West Berlin. Among the émigrés were artists, writers, and musicians of all kinds who, if they had stayed, might well have developed into cultural dissidents.