Jaruzelski and the Prime Minister, Mieczysław Rakowski, tried to explain the power-sharing arrangement they had in mind. A majority of the Party leadership seemed doubtful. ‘There was a lot of opposition, ’ said Dr Janusz Reykowski, a psychology professor in Warsaw and a prominent Communist who had been adviser to the Interior Ministry for twenty-five years. ‘Many people in the Party thought that Solidarity was a group of foreign agents and adventurers.’ The key issue was the legalisation of free trade unions. The General said that it was impossible to keep the economy stable without Solidarity, or maintain the kind of untrammelled power the Communists had possessed for decades. Then, speaking from martial law experience, he said the union could not be wiped out. ‘We do not have a choice but to start these talks,’ he said. The Prime Minister said there would be ‘revolutionary upheaval if the Party clung on to outdated ideas’. Several times he repeated that ‘we are not dreaming about giving up power . . . we are talking here about arranging to retain power’.
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By now well over half of the fast-dwindling membership of the Communist Party were over fifty years old. The leadership comprised nearly all men in their mid-sixties, loyalists whose best days had been those of ‘socialist discipline’ before Solidarity was born. As Jerzy Wiatr, a political scientist at Warsaw University and a leading figure in Polish communism, admitted: ‘We could have succeeded in a confrontation with the intellectuals, but when [we] found ourselves in conflict with the workers, the whole mental house of cards began falling apart.’ Many Party members did not understand Solidarity, a loose, apparently undisciplined force entirely alien to them.
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One of the main leaders of the Cement Group of Poland’s Party diehards was Alfred Miodowicz, head of the official government-backed trade union movement, entirely an adjunct of the Communist Party. Usually a bluff, cheery, avuncular figure fond of chewing his pipe and of a quiet life, he was now in a sombre and disturbed mood. He had remembered what had happened to his organisation, the OPZZ, in the first year and four months of Solidarity’s existence in 1980-81 when there had been competition between the two organisations. Solidarity had been triumphant, gaining almost ten million members, while his union and the Party were almost wiped out. Worse would happen if Solidarity was legalised, he said.
Miodowicz had a personal motive for wishing to scupper talks with Solidarity. At the end of November he had appeared in a live television debate against Lech Wałesa. It was the first time most Poles had seen the Solidarity leader since 1981, and many people had forgotten what he looked like. Immediately, he seemed like a refreshing, encouraging and uplifting sight. Miodowicz was an experienced performer, accustomed to appearing on TV. But Wałesa trounced him. While the Communist spoke in jargon and statistics, Wałesa adopted his most bluff and charming ‘man of the people’ style. From the moment he said ‘The West goes by car - and we’re on a bike’ the entire audience was on his side. Miodowicz had no reply, looking humiliated. Now he stared at Jaruzelski pointedly as he said that it was dangerous to hand more propaganda weapons to a popular opponent who had plenty of charisma.
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After more than ten hours of heated argument spread over two days, Jaruzelski finally insisted that a decision be made. He and his advisers knew the vote would be close. Some of his aides were convinced he would lose. He tried a risky new tactic. Suddenly, just before the vote was taken on legalising Solidarity, he threatened to resign if it went against him. ‘I could see no other way than to blackmail them.’ He persuaded the Interior Minister, General Kiszczak, his Defence Minister, General Florian Siwicki and Rakowski to resign too - ‘together, we represent a real force,’ he said. The General demanded an immediate vote of confidence in himself. If the Communists wanted to try governing in a constitutional crisis without the most powerful members of the regime, they would be welcome to try. The General won, overwhelmingly. The next day he announced that Round Table talks with Solidarity would begin on 6 February, at which he hoped a grand settlement of a long-running Polish crisis would be reached. It was the day the old Party died.
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The talks began at the elaborate white-fronted, neo-classical Radziwill Palace in Warsaw’s Old Town on a blowy, grey and freezing morning. The Pope sent a message offering prayers for the success of the negotiators. Before they started he had explained to a visitor at the Vatican the dilemma that had to be solved in Poland: ‘The Government has all the physical power but no influence, and the opposition has influence but no physical power.’ The dissident Adam Michnik, a central figure in the negotiations, put it another way. Both sides were weak, and that is why they had to compromise. ‘The authorities are too weak to trample on us. And we are too weak to topple them,’ he said.
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There were in fact eight tables - and they were doughnut-shaped, with an empty space at the centre. From this day Round Tables - shaped to reduce friction between negotiators and suggesting equality - became the symbols of revolution in Eastern Europe. Over the next two months various teams of Solidarity activists would painstakingly negotiate a package of detailed agreements with the generals and Party officials in ninety-two sessions of talks. There were talks on working practices on the shop floor, safety in industrial plants, health and education. But all the main deals about future elections, guaranteeing rights for Solidarity and the future shape of a democratic Poland, were made at five highly secret talks at a villa in Magdalenka, a small town twenty-five kilometres south-west of Warsaw, between Kiszczak and Wałesa. The plush house, set amidst woods and protected by round-the-clock guards, was used as a recreation centre by the SB.
The fact that they were talking at all stunned even those Solidarity members who had worked hard towards bringing the negotiations about. When Adam Michnik arrived at the opening ceremony of the negotiations he had an uncomfortable moment. ‘To get to the debate room one had to go upstairs and there was General Kiszczak welcoming the guests,’ he said.
I managed to hide in the bathroom so as not to be seen by anybody shaking hands with the former chief of police. I was afraid my wife would kick me out of the house. So I found a hiding place, waited for several minutes . . . but as I emerged Kiszczak was still there offering his hand to shake. Lights, camera, action. This was the way I lost my political virginity. Only two and a half years before I had been let out of prison, and there were my colleagues, friends from the Underground. I was aware that [something] historic was going on. The democratic opposition was finally taking a step over the threshold of legality.
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The public was awakened from apathy. Solidarity had secured an important concession before the Round Table talks began that the union would receive equal access to the official state media. Every night on television Poles could see the Solidarity leaders patiently explaining what had happened at that day’s negotiations. Men like Geremek, Mazowiecki and Kuro looked intelligent, decent and patriotic, not as the ‘traitors’ and ‘hooligans’ official propaganda had portrayed them. Geremek was the figure Solidarity fielded most often, a quiet, serious, polite and patient former professor of medieval history whose mild manner was surprisingly persuasive. He became a household name simply for stating straightforward, reasonable opinions shared by the overwhelming majority of people.
The Communists were equally surprised by the calibre of the oppon- ents they were dealing with. Krzysztof Dubiski, the Interior Minister Kiszczak’s private secretary, said: ‘The authorities eventually saw that the people facing them were not enemies or foreign agents but normal people who were thinking in terms of the national interest.’ In fact, the regime knew almost everything about the Solidarity negotiators. Kiszczak may have turned himself into a reform Communist, but he was still a secret policeman by nature and profession. He authorised an eavesdropping operation on all their phones and placed listening devices in all the rooms used by the Solidarity team and by the Church’s observers at the talks.
TWENTY-NINE
SHOOT TO KILL
East Berlin, Sunday 5 February 1989
IT WAS A CLEAR but bitterly cold night,—3°C. Ice lay on the ground as two young East German men walked through the Treptow district of Berlin, laughing and joking with one another. Nobody looking at them could have guessed the desperate, bold and foolhardy deed they were about to perform. Chris Gueffroy was a twenty-year-old barman. In three months he was due to be conscripted into the army for compulsory two-year national service. He was not politically active, but he hated the idea of being ordered to join the armed forces. He used to watch a great deal of West German television, where he could learn about the outside world, and his dream was to travel. Above all he wanted to see America. His old friend, Christian Gaudian, had recently heard an extraordinary claim from an acquaintance who was a conscript with the border patrol in Thuringia. He was told that, secretly, the regime had abandoned the ‘shoot to kill’ policy under which guards were under strict instructions to fire on anybody who tried to cross the Berlin Wall illegally.
There was never any publicity given to ‘wall-jumpers’, as they were called. All news about them was kept out of the official media, although occasionally articles appeared about the twelve border guards who over the years had been killed in action performing their heroic duty towards the Fatherland. But everyone in East Germany knew that many had been shot trying to escape and some had succeeded in their attempts. Although the ‘shoot to kill’ policy was always denied publicly, everyone knew it existed. The two youngsters were aware that the last to die trying to cross the border illegally in Berlin was twenty-four-year-old Lutz Schmidt, who on 12 February 1987 attempted to crash a truck through the Wall at a spot near Schoenfeld Airport. He was shot through the heart by border guards. The official version in the local newspapers was that he had died ‘in a tragic road accident’. But that had been two years ago. Since then the death penalty had been abolished in East Germany, Ronald Reagan had stood at the Brandenburg Gate eighteen months earlier and pleaded with the Soviets to ‘tear down this wall’ and just three weeks ago Erich Honecker had signed a Co-operation in Europe Treaty which stated that everybody ‘possessed the unrestricted right to leave . . . and to return to their own country’. The two friends, Gueffroy and Gaudian, were convinced the rumour that they had heard was true. They decided to test the softer image East Germany was presenting to the world.
At around 11 p.m. they approached the Britz district canal, the border separating the East from the Neuköln neighbourhood of West Berlin. Nearby was a well-known area of allotments. The two friends broke into a garden hut and found a spiked hoe, which they tied to some strong rope and managed to turn into a makeshift grappling hook. Their plan was to use the hoe to haul themselves over the first barrier, a three-and-a-half-metre-high barred fence. They managed without much difficulty. On their way to the border Gueffroy had joked with Gaudian, saying ‘Imagine, soon I’ll be calling my mother from the Ku’damm [West Berlin’s main shopping boulevard] saying “Hi, mum guess where I am?” ’ Gaudian thought that perhaps he would.
Five metres further on there was a second, lower fence, which they also managed to climb with relative ease. But this was wired and they set off a loud flashing alarm. The area was suddenly floodlit by searchlights. Border guards from the nearest watchtower were alerted and they fired warning shots. The two youngsters panicked and made a dash towards the third, and last, of the barriers before the border, a metal lattice fence. They ran into two guards who opened fire with automatic rifles. Gueffroy was hit in the chest by ten bullets and died instantly. Gaudian was hit on the foot and fell to the ground.
The pathologist’s report recorded ‘death due to natural causes’. Gueffroy’s mother was not allowed to see his body. She objected to a cremation, but the authorities went ahead with one anyway. It was standard Stasi practice for such incidents, to remove for ever any possible evidence of bullet holes in a body. Usually only the close family attended a funeral. On this occasion there were more than 120 mourners who had heard of the incident. Gaudian was arrested and at Pankow District Court on 24 May he was sentenced to three years in jail for ‘attempted illegal border crossing’. The two guards, Ingo Heinrich who fired the fatal shots, and his comrade in arms Andreas Kühnpast, were given awards and merit payments of 150 East Marks. Their superiors told them ‘not to lose sleep over it . . . you did the right thing’, though they were both posted to other duties.
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This time the regime could not hush up the murder, as usual. The official report said in its usual GDR-speak that the border guards ‘carried through border-tactical activities and placed both violators under arrest’. But an enterprising reporter from the West German
Frankfurter Rundschau
newspaper was smuggled into the cremation and the story was given mass coverage on Western TV, watched by most East Germans. Honecker faced an international outcry. The Soviets sent a polite, but stern, protest, wondering if the death had been strictly necessary. Even Honecker realised that the time had passed when young people could be shot on the border with impunity.
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Two months later he lifted the ‘shoot to kill’ instruction. But as it had never officially existed, and Honecker had a year and a half earlier looked the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the face and sworn it did not exist, the decision to abandon it was a state secret. Chris Gueffroy was the last of 238 people to be shot seeking a route to freedom through the Berlin Wall. But he was not the last to die. On 8 March Winfried Freudenberg, a thirty-three-year-old worker in a chemical factory near Berlin, filled a home-made balloon with gas and flew over the border. He made it to the West Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, but he did not live to taste freedom. His balloon crashed and he died instantly when he hit the earth.
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