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The Camps Are in Poland, but They’re Not Polish. Brochures for Israelis
The Polish embassy in Israel is working on a brochure campaign targeting young Israelis. The embassy wants young people who visit Poland to learn about the history of Polish-Jewish relations without distortions and negative stereotypes.
Tour groups will probably receive the brochures this fall—“probably,” because the embassy is not revealing many details at the moment. “We’re working on the concept, but there’s no need to talk about it until it’s finalized,” was all that Wiesław Kucel, first secretary at the embassy in Tel Aviv would say. “We have to work on the text and distribution. We are holding courses for Israeli teachers, and we organize occasional meetings between the Polish authorities and Israeli young people. This is too little, so we are trying to do battle in other forms with harmful myths.”
We managed to lay our hands on a trial version of the brochure. The text emphasizes clearly that the young Israelis are traveling to camps that “are located in Poland, but are not Polish.” The authors of the text admit that Jews were informed upon in Poland, that there were pogroms and that Jews were betrayed, but also mention that the Polish underground authorities carried out death sentences against szmalcownicy—the bounty hunters who extorted money from Jews. The brochure also contains information about the work of the Żegota Council for Aid to the Jews, and facts confirming the view that Poland is a country that is a friend of Israel today.
About 25,000 young Israelis visit Poland each year. The majority of them, as the Israeli media emphasize, regard the country they are visiting as a nest of belligerent anti-Semitism. This belief is reinforced by the special security measures that accompany the trips. There are still history lessons in Israeli schools where students hear that Poles condoned the establishment of the concentration camps in Poland.
