In school in Poland, I was taught about two world wars on the European continent. I never imagined that in the 21st century, I would be able to read about tanks destroying cities in a newspaper rather than in a history textbook, and see daily images of refugees carrying suitcases, fleeing cities as those escaping the Nazi invaders did.
The war in Ukraine seems to have caught many of my student generation off-guard. Although educated in Poland, I am now an undergraduate at St Benet’s Hall in Oxford, reading Classics. I was born well after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. To me, that period of revolution, the wall smashing and statue toppling, seemed almost like ancient history.
