In the summer of 1955, the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students was held in Warsaw. Designed to be a vast propaganda exercise and a meeting place for Eastern European communists and their comrades from Western Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, the event brought hundreds of thousands of Polish spectators to Warsaw for the five days to watch dancing, theatre and other attractions. However, the real attractions for the Polish people were the foreigners, many of whom were from Western Europe and contrasted starkly with local Poles because they shared a similar culture but were much richer and more open. Deeply stricken, many Poles realised that a decade's worth of anti-Western rhetoric had been false. Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and others from the Communist bloc actively socialised with one another. With the more exotic visitors, Poles also socialised in private apartments all around the city. College students even held debating meetings with foreigners, many of whom turned out not to be communists.