For Alice Bota Poland's rise is European success story

The crisis-ridden Europe sometimes forgets its own success stories, writes Alice Bota in the liberal weekly paper Die Zeit, with an eye to the resplendent Euro 2012 host Poland, whose story should inspire Greece in its present plight: "Many people these days have given up on the Greeks, referring to them with disdainful and angry words as if they were a scourge and not a sovereign people. This way of talking may awaken memories among Poles. Only recently people talked in much the same way about them. They came from Europe's poor house, they were the street urchins the European Union had reluctantly taken in. … Today's Poland has put its sense of shame behind it and is very much on the rise. The country has reinvented itself. … Just a short while ago the National Stadium opened in Warsaw. A European superlative has risen from the ashes of the postwar era, built by architects from Germany and Poland. … That is neither a Polish nor a Greek story, but a European one."

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