You're reading: The Guardian: Anti-Semitic echoes that threaten Euro 2012

Euro 2012 was supposed to be an unalloyed celebration of not just football, but also the renaissance of Poland and Ukraine, the two nations that suffered most in the conflict between the twin poles of 20th-century totalitarianism: Nazism and Soviet communism.

But a darkness still pervades both countries. On a recent visit to Poland and Ukraine, I couldn’t help but be struck by it. In Warsaw, which I had visited briefly 17 years ago, I was amazed at how much the past drapes itself around the city’s prosperous facade.

There are massive, agonised monuments everywhere: to the dead of the Warsaw Uprising, to the fallen and murdered in the east, the martyrs of Katyn. Every step a tourist takes seems to be guiding him on a tour of Polish suffering.

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