as a polish person, it's pretty insane to see the narrative flip in the last 10 years...
i was born in poland - at the time it was a country slowly recovering from communism
like millions of other families we were very poor, so we moved to western europe when i was a few years old
for most of my life, to be a polish kid was to be the son of poor migrants - a british person looking up to poland was almost unheard of
in 2020+ the narrative has completely flipped, today somebody moving from poland to the UK is considered an almost unfathomable downgrade
our country has been through a lot - partitions, being the epicenter of both world wars, uprisings, genocide, displacement, communism
it took 30 years of freedom to turn the resilience this has instilled in us + the hunger of being one of the poorer countries in europe, into the country poland is today - a very inspiring success story
the only sad thing about all of this, is that our great grandparents & their parents, the ones who actually endured all of this suffering & fought to make poland what it is today, didn't get to see the country it'd turn into