'Europe was very far for us'

While six western European states were in the mid-1950s preparing revolutionary steps towards "ever closer union between the peoples of Europe" - pledged in the 1957 Rome Treaty - countries like Poland had other things on their mind.

"Europe was very far for us," Bronislaw Geremek describes the years of Europe's founding fathers seen from the Eastern side of the iron curtain.

"There was a feeling that what happened in western Europe did not concern us, that western Europe was of...