THE CURTAIN RISES: EASTERN EUROPE, 1989 : ‘When I stood in front of the Wall that night, I cried like a baby. . . . ‘

Standing in history’s limelight is no guard against history’s pure surprises.

Of the world’s spectators at the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe, perhaps none were more amazed by the drama, and the swiftness of its unfolding, than the people who lived at its center. To those most closely involved, it was at once exhilarating and frightening, and the greatest adventure of their lives.

For 40 years, Communists had been in control. As Winston Churchill said in 1946, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Each decade since World War II had brought an attempt to end communism or reform it. All had failed. The steel logic of tanks ruled.

But 1989 was the end of the tunnel. It was history happening, the curtain rising.

The outcome, as the impossible followed the improbable, was never certain. No one who lived there--no coal miner, no grandmother in line for her kielbasa, no expert, no savant, no political scientist, no historian reading the future from the past--could have forecast in January the collapse of the Wall in November.

They say that it took 10 years in Poland, 10 months in Hungary, 10 weeks in East Germany and 10 days in Czechoslovakia. It was an arresting simplification to describe a year of historic magnitude and interlocking complexity.

It was, above all, a rich and amazing tale.