Your description of life for kids in Poland reminds me a lot of my own childhood in Finland -- except that I was on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and ther

Your description of life for kids in Poland reminds me a lot of my own childhood in Finland -- except that I was on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and there were no bread lines. (Quite few grey blocks of flats though...) I also remember driving through East Germany and visiting East Berlin in the mid-1980s and getting thoroughly freaked out by what a even child could recognize as a monochrome totalitarian dystopia. It's the US, with its pervasive fear that kids must be supervised at all times or they'll immediately be kidnapped and sold into sex slavery or something, that's the real outlier here. See http://www.freerangekids.com/ http://www.freerangekids.com/ for a movement that's trying to roll this back, with some success.