MALY SELMENTSI (Ukraine): It’s been 60 years since Petor Lizak has been able to wander down the single street of his tiny village to attend the church where his family had prayed for decades, or visit many of his cousins who live nearby.
Lizak, a jolly man with a thatch of white hair, was just five years old when an invisible hand sliced his village of Szelmenc in half in August 1945, amid a redrawing of Europe’s borders following World War II.
Within days barbed wire severed Lizak from his church, much family and many friends — along with two-thirds of the villagers he now lived in Velke Slemence in Czechoslovakia, while the rest were residents of Solontsi in the Soviet Union.
The family across the street from Lizak’s house bore the full brunt of the Iron Curtain reality — the new border ran straight through its house.
“They left quietly in the night so no one would see them” and settled with relatives on the western side of the new border, Lizak said. Their house was levelled.
More than six decades later, the residents of the two villages — now nationals of Slovakia’s Velke Slemence and Ukraine’s Maly Selmentsi — are eagerly awaiting the fall of one of the last vestiges of the Iron Curtain.
After years of talks between Bratislava and Kiev, a brand-new checkpoint has been erected on the village’s only street this summer and the opening is a tantalizing bureaucratic nod away.
When the border first sliced the village, Lizak’s house ended up just west of the border — a pump dumped rainwater from the roof into the 15-meter no man’s land that snaked in both directions across the plains.
As speaking with people on the other side was not allowed, the ethnic Hungarian villagers resorted to creative ways for communication — as the border guards were usually either Russian, Ukrainian or Slovak speakers, the villagers would couch announcements of births, weddings or funerals in Hungarian folk songs that they would sing along the fence.
The Soviet Union fell in 1991, Czechoslovakia split in 1993, the villagers received passports of newly-formed Slovakia and Ukraine, the barbed wire was replaced with simple wire fencing, but the border remained.
With 800 residents on both sides, the issue of opening a border crossing in the village did not top the agenda in either capital, and the prospect seemed as far removed as ever until this summer, when officials from the Council of Europe visited Ukraine and met its new pro-western president.
“He was unaware of the situation... and then we presented him the case and right away on the spot, he wrote the instructions to the government that he wants to see the situation resolved,” Matyas Eorsi, a Council of Europe rapporteur on the issue, told AFP.
