Myth-Making at the Ghetto Wall...
On April 19th, Warsaw fills with yellow paper daffodils. The Zonkile campaign – named for the flower worn by bystanders who watched the ghetto burn – has become the city's annual act of witness to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This year, the daffodils were accompanied by a petition. It asked city authorities to stop flying the Israeli flag at the anniversary ceremonies.
The petition, signed by philosopher Adam Lipszyc and activist Maria Swietlik, argues that the fighters of 1943 came primarily from communist and socialist movements – and that the Israeli flag, symbol of a state born five years after the uprising, does not belong among the markers of their memory. Kamil Kijek, a historian of Polish Jewish life at the University of Wroclaw whose 2026 monograph examines these very organizations, has documented the factual problems with this picture: three of the five organizations named in the petition – Ha-Szomer Ha-Cair, Dror, Poalej-Syjon Left – were Zionist organizations; the Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, a Revisionist Zionist force that fought in the uprising and flew a blue-and-white Star of David flag at Muranowski Square, goes unmentioned.
But historical inaccuracy alone does not explain rhetorical power. The petition circulates, feels convincing to many, and has generated a serious public debate. That requires something more than factual error. It requires myth.
Myth, in Roland Barthes's sense, is not a falsehood. It is a historically contingent meaning that has been made to appear natural – self-evident, beyond question, simply the way things are. The myth does not announce itself. It presents its conclusions as descriptions.
The petition operates through three such myths.
The flag without a past. The blue-and-white flag with a Star of David is read by the petition exclusively as a symbol of the contemporary Israeli state and its military conduct in Gaza. This reading flattens the sign's history. The flag – in various forms – was a Zionist organizational symbol from the 1890s onwards, decades before Israeli statehood. It flew at Muranowski Square not as a national flag imported from outside but as an expression of identities that grew inside Polish Jewish life. The mythological operation is precise: it strips the sign of its temporal depth and presents one layer of its meaning – the contemporary state – as the natural, total meaning. A historical object is made to stand only for the present.
The neutral guardian. The petition asks Warsaw's authorities to act as “neutral guardians” of the uprising's memory – to prevent it from being “assigned to one state or contemporary political narrative.” The neutrality claim does real mythological work. It frames the removal of the Israeli flag as a passive, administrative act: the city simply refrains from intervening. In reality, the removal of a symbol is an intervention – it changes what is visible in a commemorative space. Calling this neutrality is the myth: it presents a political choice as the absence of one.
The constituted we. The petition's most charged phrase is nasze dziedzictwo – “our heritage.” The “we” is never defined. It is constituted by the petition's logic: those who identify with the fighters' anti-fascist struggle, minus those who can be associated with the contemporary Israeli state. “Our heritage” sounds like a simple possessive. It is actually a boundary-drawing operation – performed quietly, in plain sight.
These three myths do not emerge from nowhere. They connect to a pattern in Polish public memory that predates this petition and will outlast it.
Jewish history in Poland – a presence stretching across a thousand years – is processed, in the mainstream, almost entirely through the lens of a single decade: the Holocaust. The destruction was enormous and deserves its place in memory. But the exclusive focus produces a distortion: it makes Jewish life in Poland legible primarily through its ending. What came before – the cultural complexity, the political debates, the Zionist movements, the deep connections to Palestine – recedes into background noise.
The petition fits within this distortion. It needs the ghetto fighters as symbols of universal anti-fascist resistance. To use them that way, it has to subtract their particular identities – the Zionism, the HeHalutz orientation toward Palestine, the Revisionist underground with its own flag and its own dead. The symbol is adopted; the identity of the symbol-bearers is set aside.
This is not a small editorial decision. The fighters of 1943 were people with specific beliefs about Jewish life, Jewish statehood, and where Jewish existence might have a future. Honoring them as symbols while erasing those beliefs is not a neutral act of memory. It is myth-making – the process by which historically specific, contested, complex human beings are transformed into usable abstractions.
The yellow daffodil asks Warsaw to remember. The question the petition raises – inadvertently – is: remember whom, exactly, and on whose terms.