When I was growing up, history was not something we simply studied. It was happening around us. The country into which I had been born disappeared while I was still too young to understand what that meant. New symbols, currencies and accounts of the past arrived in its place. As children, we accepted these changes with the calm practicality children bring to almost everything. The adults knew that something extraordinary had happened. We merely learned the new names.
What I did not appreciate then was that although the country had changed, many of the people teaching us had not. Our teachers had been educated within one system and suddenly found themselves preparing children for another. The textbooks changed quickly. Familiar books disappeared from classrooms and replacements arrived carrying different explanations of who we were, where we had come from and what the past was supposed to mean. History itself appeared to be under revision, and our teachers stood quietly between the old account and the new one.
Looking back, I cannot imagine how disorientating that must have been. Many of them had spent most of their lives believing they belonged to a country that no longer existed. They came from different cultures and carried different ideas of identity, yet they continued to teach with remarkable seriousness. What I remember most is not what they taught us about governments or political systems. I remember what they taught us about people.
Again and again, they returned to stories of cooperation. They told us about families separated by war, children sent far from danger and strangers who opened their homes despite having very little themselves. They spoke of cities damaged by disaster and rebuilt by people who travelled great distances to help communities they had never met. At the time, these seemed like ordinary history lessons. Only much later did I understand that my teachers were trying to preserve something.
I do not think they were asking us to remain loyal to a vanished political system. They understood its failures more intimately than we did. They had lived through its restrictions, shortages and contradictions. What they wanted to protect was simpler and more difficult: the belief that people have obligations to one another. Political structures were changing, economies were being remade and national identities were being rewritten, but they wanted kindness, solidarity and shared responsibility to survive the transition.
The world I entered as an adult often rewarded different instincts. Competition was presented as more natural than cooperation, individual achievement as more important than collective wellbeing, and material success as evidence of personal worth. These ideas created freedom and opportunity for many people, and I have no wish to romanticise what came before them. The past contained suffering, injustice and restrictions that should not be excused merely because childhood has softened their edges.
But rejecting a system does not require rejecting every value that existed within it. This is one of the difficulties of historical change. When an old world collapses, there is a temptation to treat everything associated with it as contaminated. Yet wisdom rarely arrives as a complete replacement. It asks for discrimination: what should be discarded, what deserves to survive and what remains valuable regardless of the ideology under which it was taught.
The older I become, the more I think my teachers understood this. They knew that countries could disappear, borders could move and official truths could be rewritten. They also knew that the need for connection would remain. People would still need to belong, to help one another and to feel part of something larger than themselves. No political system invented those needs, and no collapse could abolish them.
When I remember that period now, politicians and economic theories do not come to mind first. I remember teachers standing between two worlds, trying to make sense of one while preparing us for the other. They could not prevent history from changing around us. Nobody could. But they taught us that change does not relieve us of the responsibility to decide what should be carried forward.
Perhaps that is what it feels like to be born in a country that disappears. At first, there are new flags, new books and unfamiliar words. Years later, there is a quieter task: separating what belonged to the system from what belonged to the people. My teachers did not teach me how to mourn a vanished country. They taught me how to keep what was human after everything else had gone.
Leave a comment