An American-Israeli educator was verbally accosted on Sunday on the grounds of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland over an Israeli flag she was carrying during a visit.
Los Angeles native Charlotte Korchak had joined a group of high school students from Florida on a tour of Auschwitz this past weekend while in Poland for a wedding. She was taking photos of the train tracks leading to the crematorium at the camp complex when a young woman, also a visitor, approached her.
“I saw her walking towards me with fight in her face, and I could tell something was about to happen, even though I hoped it wasn’t so,” Korchak, founder and senior educator of the U.S.-based Jerusalem Education Institute, recounted to JNS on Monday.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” the young woman started.
“You are not doing this in front of a bunch of Jews outside Auschwitz,” countered Korchak, who was standing on the railway tracks, seeking to stop the altercation in its tracks as high school students from Miami’s Jewish Leadership Academy began filming the incident with their cellphones. “Walk away,” Korchak told her.
“You are killing children,” continued the woman, who spoke English with a Spanish accent, referencing Palestinian children killed during the fighting against Hamas in Gaza.
As the argument grew louder, one of the students shouted at the woman: “Hamas kills children. Do you know what happened on Oct. 7?”
“How many people have died since Oct. 7?” the young woman countered, shouting back.
“How about instead of attacking me, you understand that hate doesn’t help us,” Korchak suggested. “You asked me if I am ashamed, and the answer is no. I will never be ashamed to wear this flag, and I will never be ashamed to be a Jew.
“It’s not complicated because this is what happens to us,” she said, pointing to the Nazi crematoriums.
The woman asserted that she “loves Jews,” but then stated that “the worst are the Zionists.”
The group of high school students then broke into a nearly three-minute exchange, singing “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The Nation of Israel Lives”) and clapping, Korchak related, and the woman walked off in a huff.
“Nothing really shocks me in the world of antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” Korchak, who previously served as international senior educator at the Jerusalem office of the Los Angeles-based StandWithUs, an Israel advocacy group, told JNS.
“I thought I had seen it all,” she added, “but being attacked on the train tracks into Auschwitz, this really is a whole new low.”
