I was the man from Spekta

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was strictly optional. Most of the heroes of 1989 were middle-aged. The leaders of the velvet revolutions, the Vaclav Havels and Lech Walesas, had been through prison, tough times and many a defeat before this incredible victory. Sure, there were often students in the front line — blithe, unattached, unafraid; but what was most moving to me, as I talked to people in the crowds in Leipzig, Gdansk or Prague, were the older men and women who had endured so much and never believed they would see this day. Women who for 28 years had never even set foot on the other end of their own street, because the Berlin Wall cut across it. Men like the East Berlin porter who told me: ‘Now people are standing up straight… I think the sick will get up from their hospital beds.’

A few weeks earlier, these so-called ‘ordinary’ men and women had still been very afraid — and yet they had put on their coats and scarves, closed the front door of their small flats behind them, and taken the long, nervous walk down to the local square or the Leipzig ring road. When they left home that first time, they did not know they would not be beaten up by the police, and persecuted by the Stasi, as so many had been before, for so many years. Only when they got to the ring road or the square did they discover how many of their fellow citizens had done the same. At a few crucial moments — in Poland’s Solidarity, in Berlin on the night of the fall of the Wall — the sheer gentle force of numbers made all the difference.

Today, it all looks inevitable. It seems to us, with the burden of hindsight, that what actually happened had to happen.