Czech and Bavarian ministers commemorate Iron Curtain fall, Axel Bartelt, Albert Furacker, Tomas Petricek, Josef Bernard, Franz Loffler, Jiri Diestbier Jr.

Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek, 4th from left, Bavarian Finance and Home Affairs Minister Albert Furacker, 3rd from left, Upper Palatinate representative Axel Bartelt, left, Upper Palatinate Regional Assembly chairman Franz Loffler, 3rd from right, Plzen Regional Governor Josef Bernard, 5th from left, Jiri Dienstbier Jr., 2nd from right, and other guests symbolically cut the barbed wire again at the Rozvadov-Nove Domky border crossing to commemorate 30 years of the Iron Curtain fall, on December 23, 2019. During the whole cruel 20th century, both countries had never a chance of living together as friendly and in a neighbourly way for such a long time as now, Plzen Regional Governor Josef Bernard, who initiated the meeting, said in his opening speech. Today'a weather was as adverse as on December 23, 1989 when the Czechoslovak and German foreign ministers, Jiri Dienstbier and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, cut the barbed wire that had divided the Czech and German borders from the 1950s until the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. A memorial at the border shaped as two granite panels symbolising the Czech and German territories divided by barbed wire marks the historical event in Nove Domky. It was unveiled in December 1993 by Dienstbier Senior who died in 2011. Genscher passed away five years later. The then mayor of the Waidhaus Bavarian border municipality does not live any more either. So the only participant in the 1989 event to attend today's meeting was former Rozvadov mayor Jindrich Cerveny, right. (CTK Photo/Miroslav Chaloupka)