An Israeli delegation in Poland was forced to conduct a flag march in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp without flagbearers on Thursday, as is customary to these events.
The delegation—180 Israel Defense Forces and Israeli defense establishment members—was stopped by a local police officer at the entrance to the camp, Ynet reported.
The policeman demanded the marchers remove from sight Israeli flags that they had with them, according to the report.
Despite attempts by the delegation to reason with the police officer, the person in charge eventually instructed the flagbearers to lower the standards.
The delegation was part of the official “Witnesses in Uniform” program, which is made up of current and former members of the Israeli security forces, as well as family members of slain soldiers, who visit Poland to commemorate the Holocaust.
One of the delegation members who witnessed the incident spoke to Ynet under conditions of anonymity, saying that the experience was “humiliating.”
“We were shocked by the decision. No military ceremony has ever been halted midway; not in the forests, not in Treblinka, not in Warsaw, not in Majdanek. In all of them, we marched with flag bearers at the front,” the source was quoted as saying.
“This humiliation was public, right in front of a crowd of onlookers who were filming us and impressed by the military ceremony. Every year, delegations are allowed in with flags. There are well-known photos, always, of officers in uniform carrying flags at Birkenau. In our view, the directive stemmed from a mix of antisemitism and an attempt to reshape the past,” the person continued.
On July 21, Israeli President Isaac Herzog received the credentials of the new ambassador of Poland, Maciej Hunia. He became the first Polish ambassador to Israel since 2021, after bilateral relations soured over Holocaust-related issues that were defused in 2023.
Ties between Jerusalem and Warsaw had nosedived after Poland’s government enacted laws that were seen by Israel as whitewashing Poles’ role in the Holocaust, and then banned claims for restitution of seized property by Holocaust victims and their relatives.
The overarching dispute over the Holocaust-related issues over the last several years served to heighten a years-old difference between the two countries over the content of Israeli youth educational trips to Poland, and who would handle security for the groups.
Until the dispute broke out, tens of thousands of Israeli teens routinely traveled to Poland on such educational trips each year, touring former German death camps to learn about the Holocaust and memorialize those who were murdered. The trip has long been considered a rite of passage in Israeli education and the best way to study the Holocaust.
The educational trips have since been resumed.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry has yet to comment on the flag incident.
