By ToI Staff
Aug 19, 2025
‘You are killing children,’ woman tells Charlotte Korchak on train tracks outside death camp with group of US teens; she retorts: ‘I will never be ashamed to wear this flag’
An American educator was recently accosted for holding an Israeli flag outside Auschwitz-Birkenau during a visit to Poland, with a clip showing her heatedly responding to a question as to whether she was ashamed of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza.
Charlotte Korchak, founder of the US-based Jerusalem Education Institute, said she was “shocked” by the encounter, which came at the end of her first-ever visit to the Nazi concentration camp alongside a group of high school students from Miami.
“As we were leaving, I’m standing on the train tracks leading into Auschwitz, holding an Israeli flag, taking a picture, and a girl had the audacity to come up to me and ask me if I was ashamed for holding the Israeli flag,” she said in an Instagram video after the incident.
“You are killing children,” the unidentified woman told her in the clip, arguing that many Palestinians have died since the Gaza war was sparked by the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught.
“You’re not doing this in front of a bunch of Jews outside Auschwitz. Walk away,” Korchak answered, adding that talking about the Palestinian deaths was like talking about the German death toll in World War II.
Auschwitz Birkenau Poland – a woman attempts to shame a group of Jewish teenagers holding an Israeli flag at the former concentration camp, paying homage to the 1 million Jews murdered there.
The audacity is on another level. pic.twitter.com/GltPNMEADi
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) August 18, 2025
“How about, instead of attacking me, you understand that hate doesn’t help us?” she said. “I will never be ashamed to wear this flag, and I will never be ashamed of being a Jew.”
Korchak dismissed the woman’s claim that her remarks weren’t directed against Jews.
“Why did you come here? To learn what? To learn history, to learn why this country exists?” she answered, noting that Israel was founded so that the Holocaust wouldn’t repeat itself.
At the end of the encounter, as Korchak told her that she was an “embarrassment,” the woman turned around and left and the teenage boys sang “Am Yisrael Chai” (The Nation of Israel lives).
In the video after the incident, Korchak lamented that “even the people visiting Auschwitz have not learned the lesson” from the death camp, referring to the accoster as “an antisemite who is convinced she’s just an anti-Zionist.”
In the current war — which began after terrorists killed some 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 251 to Gaza amid rampant atrocities and overt targeting of civilians — the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 62,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques. It vehemently denies accusations that its conduct amounts to genocide, stressing that its goal is security for its citizens and returning the remaining 50 hostages, of whom 28 have been declared dead.
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