I have always thought of myself as the very model of a model European. Both sets of my grandparents were diplomats who lived and worked all over Europe and the world, and spoke several languages. My father grew up in Lyon, where he learned to appreciate good food and wine. Even more, he considered western European culture superior to his native Polish.
When he taught himself to cook, our family dinners included more French and Italian dishes, such as beef bourguignon, lasagne and chicken marengo, than Polish pierogi or kotlet schabowy, although my mum still made traditional food sometimes, particularly at special occasions such as Christmas and Easter. As a child, she spent eight years in The Hague, where she attended an American school. Both of my parents spoke French and English from a young age alongside Polish, and then picked up German when they moved to Cologne for a fellowship with the Humboldt Foundation with a three-year-old me in tow.
In Germany, people would marvel at hearing perfect German come out of my mouth. “How come the child sounds like a German but the parents have such thick accents?” Back in Poland, my parents made sure I didn’t forget German by speaking it with me every Sunday.
I was raised in a home where the TV blasted in Polish, German, French and English. I also have two university degrees, one of them from an institution in Germany.
It is little surprise, then, that I grew up with the idea that Europe, in the form of the EU, was the ultimate goal for my country. So you can imagine my excitement when I was allowed to vote in the June 2003 referendum to decide if Poland should become part of the EU. My country joined the following May – 20 years ago.
A few months after that momentous event, I said goodbye to my friends and family and boarded a Eurolines bus that would take me from my home town of Warsaw to Hamburg in Germany, to take part in the Socrates-Erasmus student programme.
But my excitement waned when I arrived at my destination. Everywhere I went, I heard comments about whether or not the 10 new countries were European enough to be included in the EU. Some people were worried about workers from eastern Europe flooding the labour market. When I went to officially register residence at my new student dorm, the civil servant who looked at my papers turned to her colleague and said: “But Poland isn’t even in the EU, is it?”
It reminded me of something my father told me while we were driving through Germany when I was a child. “Don’t speak Polish here,” he said. They don’t like us.”
I met my husband while I was in Hamburg, and stayed in Germany. I found myself at a party and listened to a German telling me I was just there to have children and live off welfare. This was, and still is, a common fear – not just among Germans, but in the rest of western Europe, even though I was a student at the time and fully prepared to enter the job market after graduating. In fact, I already had a job lined up at the university.
Another common anxiety is that all eastern European women are sex workers. When, years earlier, I had gone to Brighton to learn English, my friends and I visited a record shop whose owner asked where we were from. “Oh, you’re Polish,” he said. “You must be pole dancers, then.” When we didn’t understand, he started making lewd moves. While he meant it as a joke, I understood later that not only had he fetishised us, he had also played on the tired sex worker stereotype. We were only 18.
I moved to the Netherlands after having lived in Germany with my husband for three years. Together, we’re raising our three children and I work as a freelance writer. But Dutch people have made it clear that they will always see people from countries that formerly found themselves behind the iron curtain as second-rate Europeans. When my eldest daughter was two and her sister only a baby, a Dutch woman called the police because she heard me speak Polish to my children. Later, a daycare nanny asked the three Polish children in the group, including my eldest daughter, not to speak their own language to one another.
Sometimes, when I complain to western Europeans about the discrimination we eastern Europeans often experience, I’m told to be grateful. “The EU has done so much for Poland,” they say. “Just look at the roads.”
And, in many ways, I am so grateful. I met my husband on a European student exchange programme. Even though we come from two different countries, we could move to a third with relative ease thanks to the right of free movement in the EU. I’m proud to be a mother to three amazing children who speak several languages.
I voted in the recent elections to the European parliament. But the excitement I felt 20 years ago has cooled considerably, especially now that the Netherlands, the country I live in, has a coalition government led by Geert Wilders’s anti-immigration party, which has openly expressed its dislike of not only Muslims but eastern Europeans, too.
This month, my hometown celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising to liberate the city from German occupation. It failed, but the struggle for freedom has been described as a “testament of Europe’s enduring spirit”. It makes me feel proud that a historic event from the town where I grew up has been connected to today’s Europe.
I still love the idea of the European dream, defined as a community of people who are diverse but unified by a set of shared values. But for me and other eastern Europeans, it will continue to remain just that: a dream.
Olga Mecking is a writer and journalist, originally from Poland, who lives in the Netherlands. She is the author of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing
