Lost in Europe (2017) by Claudia Ciobanu. She gives an honest account on what it feels like to live in a foreign country inside Europe and how recent political struggles have treated the left.
Those a decade older than me had 1989. To them, this felt like 1989 reloaded. For many of us it was a premiere. […] Our generation, we said to each other back in 2005–2006, was immersed in a neoliberal consensus and had no hope for a change. History was supposed to be ending. Less than a decade later, we got our revolutions. In Romania. And in Greece too. With a vengeance.
[…] I’m not much of an activist in Poland because it’s in the nature of activism to be local, contextual, language-dependent and ridden with social norms.
Just a few decades back, our parents escaped criminal regimes. We know what it’s like to be an economic migrant. Our relatives are in the West looking for a more prosperous life. And even if we don’t know what it’s like, we want to help because otherwise we would not be human.
We make too much of our ‘home countries’ out of fear. If we cannot cope with the present, we escape into the imaginary.