This is CBSI on the World.

I'm John Baxter with Professor Matthew Longo.

His new book is The Picnic, A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain.

The masters of Central Europe, the Warsaw Pact, are not present.

We're going to a campsite called Ferto Rokish. It's on the edge of a lake that extends

from Czechoslovakia and also reaches into Austria. This is the borderlands between Hungary and freedom.

The town nearby is Sofran, and the gathering at the campsite are people from

Czechoslovakia, from Hungary, and the East Germany, known as the GDR. Those are the most important

of all because they are the most oppressed of all. They've passed through Czechoslovakia

and camped at this place for a celebration that is to take place August 19th. It is the night

before. It is August 18th. Matt, what is the expectation of the next day when everybody

gathers for the party.

So it's a particularly fraught moment.

In the government, in the halls of power in Budapest,

you have people sitting by the phones terrified that the Soviets are going to move.

Someone is going to shut everything down.

All the organizers are terrified so much so that Maria,

who had been on the phone with the border guards,

have been planning things for weeks at this point. Even the day before, August 18th, still calls the border guards just to check. The border stays open because she didn't entirely believe it would go off without a hitch.

You have a lot of tension in the campsites. So there's a very,

in this story, the focus is on a particular campsite, which John mentioned, outside Fertorakos,

which is filled with East Germans. These are East Germans fleeing the GDR, which is the socialist half or communist half of what is now unified Germany, who under the

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