A Look Back at the Eastern Bloc
Despite increased prosperity, nostalgia for old times remains.
POZNAN, Poland, Nov. 11, 2009— -- Twenty years ago, Robert Tyschko was a student activist in the Polish city of Poznan. Until the day of his arrest, he had been in the underground Solidarity movement. Printing leaflets landed him and his friends in jail.
"I was released in the summer of 1989, after a year in prison. By mid-September, Poland was the first Soviet Bloc country to have a democratically elected government and I was released," Tyschko told ABC News.
"I remember the excitement and disbelief when, for the next six months, we saw the rest of the Soviet Bloc crumble. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, all fell one after another, like dominoes."
But for Tyschko, the reuniting of East Germany and West Germany which happened 20 years ago this week, was different.
"The Berlin Wall was unique, because it was such a symbol. By then we knew it was final and the Soviets had to leave us alone."
Tyschko recalls how he and his friends gathered at his parents' tiny apartment in Poznan around an old black and white TV, cheered and toasted the Germans with Soviet champagne and cheap vodka.
"That's all we had," he smiled wistfully.
On Nov. 9, 2009, Tyschko and his friends again watched events in Berlin – in his new home in the town of Tomysl, not far from Poznan, to watch the anniversary celebrations. And once again, they drank to the Germans and applauded as former Polish president Lech Walesa toppled the first of 100 ceremonial dominos set up to dramatize the falling of the Soviet empire.
Twenty years on, Tyschko and his friends seem to reap the benefits of what the two decades of freedom have given them. They are now the new middle class – he is a doctor, his wife runs a gym. "We're doing quite OK."
But, he hastens to add, "Some are less fortunate, but are still better off than under communism.
"On the one hand," Tyschko said, "we've come a long way. We are free and independent, in the European Union and in NATO. We are free to make our choices and are incomparably more prosperous than ever before.
"But really, we're just back where we should've been a generation ago," Tyschko said. "When Europe was going forward, we were shoved into a deep freeze. Our lives were totally abnormal. Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe deprived us of one priceless commodity – normality. Today, we are again normal, no different than the rest of Europe."
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