©Siemaszko National Digital Archive Polska
©Grazyna Rutowska National Digital Archive Pol
For me, the visceral appreciation of freedom came with the sight of a newly painted wall.
It was 1990 and the wall was on a street in Warsaw. For a teenager growing up in the west, my yearly visits to grandparents behind the iron curtain mixed the familiar, the exotic, and the drab. They lived in a grey, slabby, concrete apartment block, the kind that had become the image of life under communism for westerners — and Poles — in the 1980s.
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