Poland this year was so warm and sunny – the opposite of last year – that we ate many of our meals al fresco. One evening, eating pierogis (me) and liver (Hania) in the Old Town, we got talking to the man at the neighboring table. He was an architect from Vilnius who had driven down to Warsaw – about a five-hour journey on good, EU-financed roads – to watch his son play in a soccer match. Hania asked how Poles were received in Lithuania; a friend had told us she had experienced some resentment when she'd visited Vilnius a number of years ago. The man claimed that no tension existed between the two neighbors. Then the conversation turned to the war in Ukraine.
“Now we understand,” the man said, “why there was a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.”
