Black-bordered blue-and-white Zionist flags flew from a platform at the Dachau concentration camp yesterday as former Jewish prisioners and U. S. officers and men participated in a ceremony marking the liberation of the camp and commemorating the thousands of persons who died there.
Seated on the flag-bedecked platform, which was also adorned by a tremendous yellow star and streamers in English and Hebrew recalling the victims of the Nazi terror, were the chief of the U. S. military administration in Bavaria and a representative of the Allied appointed premier of the province.
The ceremony was held in the courtyard of the S. S. barracks, where 1,700 Jews from all parts of Europe are housed. Music was supplied by eight survivors of a fifty-man orchestra of Jewish musicians, some of world renown, who were formerly ecspelled to play for the S. S. men after thirteen hours of hard manual labor daily.
The audience consisted of men, women and children, many still wearing prison grab, who sat in tightly packed rowe. The first speaker said: “We belong to the army of those fallen on the battlefield of organized mass-murder. We are not alive. We are dead.” The camp director spoke on behalf of UNRRA, after which Dr. M. Gruenberg, a farmer camp inmate, gave a moving account of the suffering and death of the Dachau Imates, including children of 15 who have spent one-third of their lives in Dachau.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.