On April 19, 1948, five years after the first shots were fired in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a stunning monument depicting the fighters was unveiled in front of thousands of people amid the ruins of the former ghetto area. Designed by Nathan Rapoport, a Warsaw-born Jew who fled to Russia during the war, it utilized granite that the Nazis had commissioned for constructing their own victory monument.

Ghetto commemorations were soon locked into Warsaw’s calendar. They had a particularly high profile in the 1980s, as survivor numbers dwindled and General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s regime struggled to maintain legitimacy against the challenge from Solidarność, the independent trade union movement.

Israeli dignitaries were welcome guests. Polish-Israeli relations had reached an all-time low in 1968, when a power struggle within the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) descended into a vicious campaign of denunciation of opponents as “Zionists,” “foreign agents,” a “fifth column.” This spilled over into open antisemitism, with Jewish members labelled as “conspiratorial,” “cosmopolitan,” and “anti-Polish.”