Welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. Today we're taking

you back to August 1989, when activists in Hungary and Austria planned a symbolic picnic

to protest against Soviet rule. It led to some of the first physical breaches in the Iron

Curtain. In 2011, Rob Walker spoke to one of the key organizers, Balberger Habsburg-Dogless.

It's August the 19th, 1989, and hundreds of people have gathered in the countryside close

to Hungary's border with Austria. In front of them is a metal fence and a small group

of border guards. On the surface, they're all here just for a picnic. What we were planning

to do was obviously to grill sausages and then also to drink good Hungarian wine. There

was a stage where politicians would speak about integrating Hungary into a unifying Europe.

Balberger Habsburg-Dogless was one of the organizers of what was built the Pan-European

picnic. She and the others planning the event had got permission to hold it at an unofficial

border crossing. Their aim was to show that Hungary's frontier with Austria was no longer

a part of the Cold War, Iron Curtain. The plan was that we would open the border for

one hour or so, that from both sides an official delegation with the mayor on the top should

come to the border that they should sort of shake hands, and the other thing was that

we had talked to the border guards and asked them whether this could be an official border

post for this day. At the time, Balberger Habsburg-Dogless was working for her father Otto van Habsburg,

the former crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was chairman of a group called the

Pan-European Union, which was calling for a unified Europe. Balberger had grown up in

the West, but together with local activists she had been planning the picnic in Hungary

for months. As the day got closer though, other events in Eastern Europe began to overshadow

their plans. The summer holidays started and also the holidays in the factories of Eastern

...