Many people these days have given up on the Greeks, referring to them with disdainful and angry words as if they were a scourge and not a sovereign people. This way of talking may awaken memories among Poles. Only recently people talked in much the same way about them. They came from Europe’s poor house, they were the street urchins the European Union had reluctantly taken in.…
Today’s Poland has put its sense of shame behind it and is very much on the rise. The country has reinvented itself.… Just a short while ago the National Stadium opened in Warsaw. A European first-rate power has risen from the ashes of the postwar era, built by architects from Germany and Poland.…
That is neither a Polish nor a Greek story, but a European one.
Source: Alice Bota in Die Zeit, June 7
Perhaps the Poles pay their taxes and don’t whinge about their version of living under the Ottomans.
I was very impressed by their public policy leadership during the period I lived in Europe and visited frequently. The mainstream sought to rediscover and renew that part of their past that was multicultural and religiously tolerant. Helps to have a Foreign Minister who was a human rights champion (Solidarnosc) and scholar. (Geremek)
Mike Sky