The Last Shortwave Signal From Bucharest

On Christmas Day, 1989, Romanian radio crackled to life with words no one had dared speak in forty-four years: "The dictator has fallen. You are free." In the city of Timișoara, where the revolution had begun ten days earlier in the courtyard of a Reformed church, people poured into the streets weeping. Pastor László Tőkés, whose refusal to be silenced had sparked the uprising, heard the broadcast from the apartment where he had been under house arrest.…