Wearing our best clothes to make a good impression on this first trip, we practiced polite German phrases and conversation starters on each other in the car, getting ready for our grand audience with the West. But when we were finally let across, the first places we entered on the Austrian side had posted notices that read, in glaring capital letters: CZECHS, DO NOT STEAL HERE!

For the rest of the trip, we tried to keep our voices down in public, so no one could hear us speaking a Slavic language, and hoped that no one would notice our Czech license plates. As we drove deeper into Western Europe, the sense of longing grew. Surely we’d meet someone, somewhere, who would not be able to tell that we were only Czechs?

Of course, we were used to feeling second class. This was built into our upbringing and culture. We Czechs, like other Central Europeans, had lived for decades with a feeling of failure for not having been able to free ourselves from Soviet dominion, along with its absurd, backward, and cruel politics.

Even before communism ended, most of my friends and I suspected that shelves in stores were not meant to be empty, that toilet paper was not meant to be scarce, and that there were more enjoyable ways for an eight-year-old to spend an afternoon than standing guard in a tiny uniform in front of a pro-Soviet monument. (This was one of my duties as a member of the Young Pioneers.) Our parents, despite strict censorship, got their hands on samizdat copies of Orwell novels. None of us had any doubt that the Europe we knew then was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

The West, we sensed, was a better place: polished, rich, and free. My friends even had a slang word for cool: If something was top-notch awesome, it was “British.” Of course, we knew to say this only quietly, because any complimentary talk about the West could be overheard by our schoolteachers and get our parents in trouble. We were the West’s biggest fans and groupies, like players who hadn’t made it onto the team but kept cheering for it in the stands. Or like players sold to another team against their will because they did not matter enough.

Václav Havel became president in 1989, and the last Soviet soldier left Czechoslovakia in 1991. Countries in my region were eager to join NATO and the European Union, and spent most of the 1990s making reforms and pleading with the West to let us in. Fortunately for those who wanted to look toward Europe, Russia, preoccupied with its own economic implosion, was busy. The Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. But the familiar long border lines lasted well into my 20s, with customs officers meticulously checking whether Czechs—and Hungarians, Slovaks, and Poles—headed for an Italian beach had enough money on them or whether they were the real owners of their cars, since the EU Schengen Area that guaranteed free movement of persons was not open to us until 2007.