Europe’s main problem is that it doesn’t exist. Not yet. When the physiotherapist from Cesena Filippo Zanella went to Poland to track down Noemi, his little girl, supported by two sentences from the Court of The Hague which required his ex-Polish wife to give her back to him, he imagined having to fight against the woman’s family, not against the institutions. Instead he found himself faced with a wall of hostile silence, and a police who hindered his search in every way.
You don’t have to be a parent to identify with the desperate passion with which Filippo, after having lowered the shutters of his clinic in Romagna, began to travel the streets of Poland in search of Noemi, inch by inch and month after month, without finding anyone who was willing to help him or at least sympathize with him.
For his interlocutors, that heartbroken father was not a European citizen who was claiming a right recognized by European jurisprudence. He was an Italian, that is, a foreigner, who wanted to bring a Polish girl back to Italy, that is, abroad.
But just when Philip was starting to lose hope, an anonymous message alerted him the place on the border with Belarus where the daughter was. He says that Noemi’s guardian angel sent it to him. But I like to think that that angel, capable of putting the eternal reasons of humanity ahead of the stale reasons of nationalism, is simply a Polish, i.e. European, citizen.
