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The initially inconspicuous opening of a border gate of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary in August 1989 then triggered a chain reaction, at the end of which the GDR no longer existed and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. It was the largest escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.
After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was suppressed by Soviet forces, Hungary remained a communist country. As the Soviet Union weakened at the end of the 1980s, the Eastern Bloc disintegrated. The events in Hungary were part of the Revolutions of 1989, known in Hungarian as the Rendszerváltás (lit. ' system change ' or ' change of regime ').
The removal of Hungary's border fence with Austria occurred in 1989 during the end of communism in Hungary, which was part of a broad wave of revolutions in various communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The border was still closely guarded and the Hungarian security forces tried to hold back refugees.
Headed by task force commander General George B. Dany, it successfully evacuated over 27,000 Hungarian refugees to the United States over a period of 90 days, with an additional 11,000 being settled, also in the US, in the following year. [1] Operation Safe Haven was the most significant European humanitarian airlift since the Berlin Airlift. [2]
Hungary and the United States of America are bound together through myriad people-to-people contacts in business, the arts, academia, and other spheres. [1] According to the US Department of State, the two countries first had diplomatic relationship established in 1921; Hungary severed the relationship in 1941 during World War II, however it was reestablished after the fall of communism in 1989.
In 1956, Hungary was again under the power of a foreign state, this time the Soviet Union, and again, Hungarians rose up in revolution. Like the 1848 revolution, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 failed and led to the emigration of 200,000 "56-ers" fleeing persecution after the revolution, 40,000 of whom found their way to the United States.
35 years on, house librarian Tizane Navea-Rogers revisits the bloodless Velvet Revolution that changed the face of a nation
The official emblem of the Pan-European Picnic in Hungarian The border crossing where the Pan-European picnic took place. The Pan-European Picnic (German: Paneuropäisches Picknick; Hungarian: Páneurópai piknik; Slovak: Paneurópsky piknik; Czech: Panevropský piknik) was a peace demonstration held on the Austrian-Hungarian border near Sopron, Hungary on 19 August 1989.