When we were teenagers in Poland, it was the end of the 1990s and by then we had already acquired the freedom to travel to Paris or London to go to language school and work. To afford this, we travelled by shabby, worn-out buses. It took dozens of hours, and the journey was always further prolonged by a stop of several hours at the Polish-German border.
The border was real and symbolic. It was the beginning of European space, but in our heads, we were making a journey through time – a trip into the future, to a time when as members of the European Union we would be realising the promise of a better life.
