“We had to listen to the Poles for 800 years. Today we don’t have to listen anymore.”

The anecdotes which tell us more about history, AND THE FUTURE than any textbook.

On Sept. 4, 2003, three Israeli air force F-15s flew low over the gates of the former death camp at Auschwitz. On the ground — on the train tracks, in fact, leading to the gas chambers — a delegation of Israeli military officers stood at attention.

They listened as the lead pilot, then-Brigadier General Amir Eshel, broadcast a statement from his cockpit: “We pilots of the air force, flying in the skies above the camp of horrors, arose from the ashes of the millions of victims and shoulder their silent cries, salute their courage and promise to be the shield of the Jewish people and its nation, Israel.”

Officers who attended the ceremony told me they dreamed, at that moment, of somehow devising a way to send those planes back in time, to bomb the tracks on which they stood while the cattle cars were still rolling.

The Israeli air force, of course, had permission from the Polish authorities to fly this extraordinary mission. But what wasn’t known at the time was that the Poles and the Israelis disagreed about the flight path. The Poles wanted the Israelis to stay high in the air, above the clouds. Eshel, however, disobeyed the Polish directive, and flew low, so the Israelis on the ground could see him. In a story that has since become famous among Israeli air force officers, Eshel told his fellow pilots, “We had to listen to the Poles for 800 years. Today we don’t have to listen anymore.”

‘To Never Forget’

A photograph of the Auschwitz flyover hangs today in offices across the Israeli defense establishment. In the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, the photos I saw were signed by General Eliezer Shkedi, who was the air force commander at the time. The inscription on these photos read, “To remember. To never forget. To rely on no one but ourselves.”