My wife was born in Poland and escaped with her mother after the Hungarian revolution.

I first went there in 1972, when it was still deeply under Russian persecution, and have been back two dozen times since.

Over the years, I’ve been privileged to watch the country’s amazing transformation, through times when people were literally afraid to walk the streets at night, to the euphoria of Solidarity, the rise of democracy and the realization by the younger generations that anything is possible if you grab the future with both hands and work hard.

The Poles are a resilient people.

For hundreds of years, everyone from the Swedes to the Russians, the Turks and Germans have taken the notion to violate its borders and sovereignty.

Not that the Poles rolled over and let it happen. Quite the contrary.

The Polish spirit is the only reason the country’s vibrant culture is alive and well today.

But when you’ve been the largest country in Europe and wiped off the map several times, there’s little wonder significant stress levels plague the population up to the present day.

Since the Poles rose up with Solidarity, eventually chasing the Russian bear out of their country in 1989, there have been 28 years of steady progress, and finally, a healthy degree of prosperity and good prospects.

But all the while, Poland keeps looking over its shoulder with an understandable degree of trepidation, that appears to be wholly justified in the summer of 2017.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was more than a little unsettling to the Poles.

That was bad enough when, in the middle of July, China sent one of its most advanced destroyers and a missile frigate to the Baltic to exercise with 10 Russian ships.

Now, the Washington Post reports Russia is preparing to send 100,000 troops to the very edge of NATO territory, read Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and the like, for exercises scheduled to last several months.

Who can fault the average man or woman in Poland for feeling uneasy?

Granted, NATO, with Canada playing a small but valuable role, has been active in the region since April, 2014.

But in reality, that has been more a rattling of pocketknives.

Although 25,000 NATO troops from 20 allied nations recently took part in Exercise Sabre Guardian in Eastern Europe, it’s a pale show of strength compared to the opposition and that is enough to make any Pole feel uneasy.

A few weeks ago I spoke with an attendant in a Krakow museum who expressed real fear for the future of his country.

He almost begged the West to take a more proactive role in his part of the world.

That’s what it’s like to live with a voracious neighbour on your doorstep.

A young Polish Airborne soldier told me how the army is constantly sending him on one training mission after another, in what sounded like a frenzy of preparation for who knows what?

NATO’s activity in Eastern Europe does little to ease the nerves of a people who have endured so much for so long.

But then, I don’t suppose there’s a lot that can be done to eliminate a deep-seated sense of foreboding in a nation where the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the Nazi infliction of the Auschwitz concentration camp on the country and 45 years of Russian domination, are all part of the collective memory.

I’m not trying to judge the value of Canada’s military participation in Eastern Europe, but I do want to convey the very real dread of the average people in Poland.

Some 450 Canadian troops in Latvia, a couple of hundred in the Ukraine and a handful on training assignments in Poland will do little to ease the concerns of the populace.

NATO calls its Central and Eastern European activity Operation REASSURANCE, but one would be hard pressed to find a Polish citizen reassured by the exercise.

And who can blame them?

Col. Gilbert W. Taylor (HCol ret’d) is President of LPF Ontario and Immediate Past President of the Royal Canadian Military Institute