Poland hosted most of the world’s Jewish population for hundreds of years. Their reward: Polack jokes. There’s a huge amount of old world bad blood between Poles and Jews. Americans couldn’t begin to understand.
Yeah. Our bitter enemies become our friends. We're weird that way.
Deep in the Polish countryside, the Israelis were astonished and gratified to find themselves well-received and that the local Jewish community killed by the Nazis was memorialized with an impressive stone monument. It was paid for and erected by local Poles and flowers were regularly placed there in recognition of Jewish holidays.