Exhausted and bruised, and still garbed in his striped prison clothes, Alexander Braun, a 48-year-old Paris Jew, yesterday marched in the May Day parade here, bearing aloft a placard reading: “I am a survivor of Oswiecim.”
Braun, who headed the contingent representing the League Against Anti-Semitism, told his story to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent during a pause in the procession. Deported in 1943, he said, he saw the insides of Oswiecim, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen before his liberation last week. His wife and daughters were gassed, and his only surviving relative is a brother, Eugene, in Rio de Jansiro.
Farther back in the parade were numerous Jewish delegations under the leadership of the General Jewish Defense Committee. Included were red-necktied Bundists, Communists and Zionists bearing “Death to Petain” banners. They were surrounded by a swarm of men and boys selling Jewish newspapers. As a Jewish-appearing U. S. soldier passed by in a jeep, they greeted him in Yiddish and he smiled, waving his hand in greeting.
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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.