For the most powerful country in Europe this vision from Hungary could not be accepted. It stood not just in opposition to the policy of the German government of the day, but of each German government’s immigration policies since the Second World War. The pressure from Berlin was unrelenting. Yet the irreconcilably different outlooks between East and West remained. That May, just a month before his country took over the Presidency of the European Union, Robert Fico, defended Slovakia’s refusal to take in quotas of migrants as dictated by Brussels and Berlin. Despite the threat of huge fines for every migrant not taken, the Slovakian Prime Minister dug in: ‘Islam has no place in Slovakia’, he said. Migrants change the character of our country. We do not want the character of this country to change.’15

These countries had drunk from the same wells as the Western European countries for most of their histories, yet a different attitude had clearly settled here. Perhaps they did not feel or otherwise had not absorbed the guilt of Western Europe and did not think that all the faults of the world could be attributed to them. Or perhaps they had not suffered the enervation and tiredness that had afflicted the Western European countries. Or perhaps, having had no mass immigration during the post-war period (despite having much else), they had retained a sense of national cohesion that the Western Europeans were struggling to imagine or remember. Perhaps they were looking at what was happening in Western Europe and simply decided that they did not want the same things to happen in their countries.

Perhaps it was all of these things. And perhaps underlying them was the fact that the Visegrad countries had suffered the effects of Western torpor once before. Certainly they alone of the European nations had within living memory all experienced the tragic dimensions of life that their Western allies had forgotten. They knew that everything they had could be swept away from one direction and then just as easily swept away from another: that history does not give any people time off even when they feel they deserve it.

Meantime the rest of the continent remained as much prisoners of history as ever. By the summer of 2016 the Austrian and French authorities had tried to shut their borders to further waves of migrants coming up through Italy from their arrival points on Lampedusa and Sicily. As these restrictions came in, more migrants intent on heading north began to resort to the Swiss option. During the winter these mountainous passes can be lethal, though during the summer the remote, thin trails across the Italian-Swiss border are passable. That summer the Italian paper La Stampa spoke to locals in the village of Dumenza that lies between Lake Maggiore and the Swiss border. They noted the trails that were being used, and one old local commented in passing, ‘These are the same paths that Italian Jews used to flee during the war.’16