Hitting the Wall

Wall Street Opinion Journal | John Fund | June 11, 2007

Reagan’s prophetic Berlin speech, 20 years later.

Rip Van Winkle has nothing on Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker who just emerged from a coma that began 19 years ago–just prior to the collapse of communism in his country. His take on how the world around him has changed beyond recognition comes at an appropriate time. It was 20 years ago tomorrow that Ronald Reagan electrified millions behind the Iron Curtain by standing in front of the Berlin Wall demanding: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Mr. Grzebski is, of course, thrilled to see the wife who cared for him and the 11 grandchildren he didn’t even know he had. But he is also shocked at how his homeland has changed. “When I went into a coma, there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed, and huge gas lines were everywhere,” he told Polish TV. “Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin. What amazes me is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning. I’ve got nothing to complain about.”

His real-life story could have been taken from the plot of “Goodbye Lenin!,” a popular 2003 German film in which a teenager desperately tries to hide the fall of communism in East Germany from his mother, a party loyalist, to prevent her from dying of shock as she recovers from a coma.

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