I'm John Batchel with Professor Matthew Longo.

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

30 years later, there's a celebration for that moment of August 19, 1989.

What's happened immediately after in domino fashion. The Iron Curtain countries fall.

The Berlin Wall, which is everybody's memory, is November, early November that year. Gorbachev hangs

on for a little bit longer, but the Soviet Union dissolves at the end of 1991.

It is now 30 years later, and our intrepid professor, scribe, researcher, Matthew Longo,

is visiting who remains, Nemeth for one, Agnes for another, who remains to remember.

And Lazzo Innes, the man who is the curator of documents

from that moment, and led Matt first to the border. So I'm interested to go to the border with Matt

today to the spot itself and what does it look like. The one thing, and this is a perverse irony of the Iron Curtain,

so for so many decades, the Iron Curtain was an area where there was no development,

that all there ever was fencing and landmines and so,

but there was never any kind of industry and there was no settlements,

that now the Iron Curtain is the most green

part of Europe. In fact, for a lot of it, it's now a big green zone. It's called a green belt,

because it's just essentially woodlands. In Hungary, when you go to the site, what you see is

the overgrown woods. The very woods, the East Germans tried to pass through, this incredibly scary dark wood

at night when they're fleeing, essentially armed guards, now is just this beautiful pastoral space.

It's hills, it's pastures, its trees, but it also has no sense of carrying this mark of history.

And so Laslo has this profound way of referring to it as Anos Mundi, is how he describes it, this place that's completely unremarkable and hidden into the bushlands between states in the peripheries.

You would never know that it held this powerful story of not just the

...