Youth Exchange Members Scale New Heights

The first thing that caught the eye of Szabolcz Bertalan and his fellow teen-age Hungarian cliff climbers when they arrived Friday at the downtown Los Angeles Mall was a 20-foot-high rock wall.

They did what comes naturally to experienced climbers: They scampered up it like spiders wearing sneakers.

As a noontime crowd gaped at the human flies, a few feet away some of their Soviet and American colleagues were putting the first touches of acrylic colors on a 13-foot-by-10-foot wall painting--a “Mural for International Understanding”--which will depict a mosaic of life in the three countries.

Los Angeles artist Margaret Garcia, who designed the mural and who will complete it over a month’s time, pointed to a Soviet woman on the canvas carrying a sign in Russian reading, “Let There Always Be Sky.”

She said the sign captures the spirit of the painting.

“If we blow each other up, there won’t be any sky or sun or life” for humans to savor, Garcia said, while directing the young people in their painting efforts. Building East-West peace bridges to avoid a nuclear holocaust “has to be the most important issue today,” she said.

Creating a mural in the subterranean portion of the mall was the crowning achievement of a joint venture of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Youth Exchange Program of Santa Monica and the Denver-based Colorado Outward Bound School.

The aim of the program, begun in 1983, is to break down East-West barriers between young people. It included two weeks of rigorous hiking and climbing in the Colorado Rockies and the July 4 weekend stopover in Los Angeles.

Soviet and Hungarian contingents, six in each group, consisted of experienced climbers, some of them of world class, according to the group’s organizers. But it was much harder for the Americans in the Colorado wilderness because, for the most part, they had done considerably less climbing, said Michael McCarthy, 18, of Los Angeles, one of seven on the American team.

“They climb like a fish takes to water,” he said of the Hungarian and Soviet participants.

The Colorado mountain experience also gave the youngsters, mostly teen-agers, an opportunity to try to better understand each other. But the majesty of the Colorado Rockies could not erase bitter memories.

One day during a camp lunch, a Soviet youth and a Hungarian got into “a hot exchange” over the Soviet Union’s 1956 invasion of Hungary, recalled Peri Chickering, 30, an Outward Bound director. “They both had a different perspective of what happened.”

But a few minutes later, she added, the two were helping each other across a stream and had--for the moment--put aside their differences. Wilderness survival forced the antagonists to cooperate, she observed.

In a sense, that was what the emerging brightly colored mural was all about, too: the need to survive in a world of sharply contrasting cultures and political views.

Dominated by the rendering of planet Earth, the painting contains messages of East-West cooperation in space and on Earth, the latter in the form of a mountain-climbing expedition.

The mural was underwritten by actor Tom Cruise and had the backing of Mayor Tom Bradley and local businesses.

Ending their journey in Los Angeles was a nice touch, the youngsters generally agreed. But even the City of Angels, with all of its diversions for the young, is not perfect. One of the Soviet climbers, Tanja Poberezovskaya, 19, said in broken English that she feels Los Angeles is “a great city.” But the borscht she had at a local restaurant, she declared, would hardly get four stars back home.

Yana Krupina, 19, of Kiev, a rock-climbing instructor, laughed when she heard this. The borscht, she said, “was OK, but it’s not very Russian.”