An Israeli delegation of 180 military and defense personnel was prevented from carrying national flags during a solemn march at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on Thursday, in an incident that has reignited sensitivities in Israel-Poland relations. The delegation, part of Israel’s official ‘Witnesses in Uniform’ program, was stopped at the entrance to the camp by a local police officer, who ordered that the Israeli flags be removed from view.
According to a report at The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), despite repeated attempts by Israeli representatives to reason with the officer, the order was enforced. Delegation leaders ultimately instructed their flagbearers to lower the standards, leaving the group to proceed without the traditional display of the national emblem.
The Witnesses in Uniform program, which includes current and former members of the Israel Defense Forces, the broader defense establishment, and family members of fallen soldiers, has long conducted commemorative marches in Poland. These ceremonies, held at former Nazi concentration and extermination sites, typically feature uniformed participants carrying Israeli flags as symbols of resilience and remembrance.
One participant, speaking anonymously to Israeli media and cited by JNS, described the event as “humiliating.” The individual noted that never before had such a prohibition been enforced: “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 added that the prohibition was especially painful given the visibility of the moment. “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 participant said.


