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U.S. Ambassador in Poland Visits Maidanek; Sends Ashes of Exterminated Jews to America

September 16, 1945
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Arthur Bliss Lane, United States Ambassador to Poland, today returned from a trip to the extermination camp at Maidanek where the Germans murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews in gas chambers and burned their bodies in crematoriums.

“The most extensive reports in the press hardly conveyed the real picture of horror which one withnesses at the Maidanck camp even today,” the U.S. envoy declared. He brought with him ashes of the cremated Jews and toys which had belonged to Jewish infants. He will send these relics to the United States to be used in a forthcoming exhibition of German and Japanese atrocities.

Mr. Lane’s visit to Maidanek coincided with “Maidanek Week” which is now being observed throughout Poland in memory of those killed at the camp by the Germans. large mass-meetings are being held in Warsaw, Lublin, Cracow and other cities. Exhibitions depicting the horror of Maidanek are also being shown in many towns at the request of the central government in Warsaw.

In Maidanek itself a mass-meeting attended by more than 20,000 people, including delegations from all parts of the country, was held. The meeting was addressed by leaders of various political parties, in the presence of high government officials.

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