Karel Cudlin Prague, German Embassy, garden of Lobkowicz Palace

Hermann Huber: GDR refugees in the embassy, 1989 On 29 September, our delegation in New York learned that the GDR was prepared to agree the next day to a solution proposed by Genscher. The delegation flew back to Bonn at once, arriving there at 8 a.m. on the 30th, then caught a 4 p.m. flight to Prague. Now we too learned that things were on the move. I collected the Minister from the airport, then we had a meeting at the embassy at 6.30 p.m. We managed to make our way through to my apartment on the top floor. At 6.58 p.m. the Minister stepped onto the balcony of the domed hall, whose floor space was fully occupied by bunk beds. From there, he addressed the refugees: “My dear fellow countrymen, I have come to you today to inform you that your departure for the Federal Republic of Germany is imminent.” The jubilation of the some 4,000 people in the park was indescribable. Genscher was later to begin his recollection of the event with the sentence: “Those hours in the German Embassy in Prague on 30 September 1989 were amongst the most moving of my life.” The first refugees left for the buses provided by the GDR Embassy only a short while later. They were overjoyed. The trains were accompanied by leading officials from the Foreign Office, State Secretary Priesnitz from the BMB, and members of the embassy staff. The last train left Prague at 7 in the morning. I spent all night on the different station platforms. At 8 a.m. I lay down to sleep. I had almost forgotten what sleep was. 

But I was up again by 10, inspecting the courtyard, the park, the building. An eerie silence hung over the diabolical chaos I was observing. It is no doubt difficult to appreciate, but somehow I missed the refugees. Perhaps it was also due to the hollow feeling inside, after all the weeks of tension. GRC aides invited my wife and myself to eat goulash soup with them in the courtyard. We were grateful for the offer. They must have realised how we were feeling. 

By about midday, some two hundred people had once again gathered before the gates of the embassy and were asking to be let in. They had arrived too late to join the exodus. After consulting the Foreign Office, I tried to explain to them that there would in all probability be no repetition of this extraordinary emigration. At about 5 p.m. I opened the gate and the crowd, now 300 strong, rushed past me into the park. In no time at all, an orderly campsite again rose from the chaos. By the evening of the next day, we were already registering 1,622 refugees, and by 3 October, the number had swollen to between 3,800 and 4,000. This second act of the drama lasted only until 4 October, but was almost more difficult to handle than the first wave. Refugees flooded into the embassy from every direction. 

We were hardly able to keep count of them any more. When I received the order on the night of 2/3 October to close the embassy gates for good, there were more than 5,000 people in the embassy and park, and more than 2,000 still outside the gates. At about 4.30 p.m. on 3 October, I responded to the urgent pleas of the medical staff and opened the gate once again for women and children, as the temperature had now dropped dramatically. 

Six hundred women and children streamed into the compound, which was already full to overflowing. I had to accommodate them in the basement boiler room, the only space that was left. By the time they finally began to leave at 6.30 p.m. on 4 October, conditions had become monstrously unhygienic. By now, it was scarcely possible to keep them fed and deal with the waste. And yet everyone remained absolutely calm. 

(Source: Statement of the German Embassy in Prague, internet)