Shortly before dawn on Monday, April 9, 1990, I was awakened by an ear-splitting clanging and bone-rattling jolts. My overnight train from Budapest had stopped at Chop, at the junction of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. There, its wheels and axles were changed to fit the wider-gauge Soviet tracks. Leaving my compartment for a first breath of Ukrainian air, I peered out through a grimy window in the passageway and saw a uniformed official barking out orders to his subordinates. Or so I surmised. For his language sounded alien, barbaric, even a bit frightening. It was, of course, Hungarian. I imagined what it must have been like to be a Galician villager during World War I with armed Honvéd soldiers threatening you in an utterly incomprehensible Central Asian tongue.
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