In Any Language . . .

EAST GERMANY

FREIHEIT

"I must weep for joy that it happened so quickly and simply. And I must weep for wrath that it took so abysmally long."

-- Wolf Biermann, East German poet and protest singer who was stripped of his citizenship in 1976 while on tour in West Germany. An idealistic socialist, he returned to his country in December.

POLAND

WOLNOSC

"Polish society, often badly assessed by itself and its leaders, has proved itself better and much more mature than we thought it was."

-- Andrzej Wajda, Senator and movie director.

HUNGARY

SZABADSAG

"I am proud that these historical changes have come about without bloodshed or force. This is the result of the wisdom of the people. No one called for revenge."

-- Arpad Goncz, author and playwright. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1956 and released under a 1963 amnesty. Unable to publish, he worked as a pipe fitter.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

SVOBODA

"In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence."

-- Vaclav Havel, playwright and leader of the democracy movement

BULGARIA

SVOBODA

"Until now silence has been the only form of honesty, but today we cannot be silent any longer. We are being drowned in the torrent of applause from a claque; suffocated in the sewage of lethargy and sunk in the superidealized cesspool."

-- Edvin Sugarev, poet and literary critic

SOVIET UNION

SVOBODA

"The many countries crushed into some semblance of historical and ideological unity under communism are at long last beginning to assert their claims to separate identities. These countries are claiming their right to be themselves."

-- Andrei Sinyavsky, one of the leading dissidents of the 1960s, immigrated to Paris in 1973 after almost six years in a labor camp

CHINA

ZEE-YOU

"The pressure against the system is building, and there comes a point beyond which one cannot turn back. However naive our faith may seem, we will continue the fight. Even if we are convinced the battle is lost from the beginning, at least for the time being we will have to answer the challenge."

-- Wuer Kaixi, a leader of the students' movement, now in self-imposed exile in the U.S.