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51 Jawischowitz, March 1944– January 1945 7 In March 1942 Hermann Göring Industries (Reichs­ werke ag für Bergund Huttenbetriebe, known as the “Hermann Göring Werke,” or hgw) signed a contract with Wirtschafts Verwaltungshauptamt, the­ economic-administrative arm of the ss, according to which Auschwitz would send six thousand prisoners to labor in the Brzeszcze-Jawischowitz coal mines, about five miles from Auschwitz.1 hgw and the camp management together built barracks to house the prisoners and the ss personnel who guarded them, creating the Jawischowitz sub-camp.2 A first shipment of 150 Jews was sent there on August 15, 1942. The population grew steadily, and by mid-1944, when Eliezer arrived, twenty-five hundred slave laborers were at work, most of them Jews from Poland or Western Europe, as well as Poles, Russians, and Germans.3 Jawischowitz’s first commander was ss‑Unterscharführer Wilhelm Kowol. Kowol liked to get drunk in his office and then go out to shoot indiscriminately. He took part in the selections that singled out those who had grown too weak to work. These filled the sub-camp’s monthly quota for the gas chambers and furnaces at nearby Birkenau.4 He was removed from his post because of complaints about his behavior—his drinking, his fraternization with women, his connections with prisoners, along with negligence and contemptuousness of his responsibilities. Kowol was replaced by ss‑Hauptscharführer Josef Remmele , who took over the job in July 1944 and held it until the evacuation. He had previously served at Dachau, Auschwitz, and Auschwitz’s Eintrachthütte sub-camp. Remmele was later brought to trial in an Allied court in West Germany and was convicted and executed. Kowol’s fate is unknown.5 Eighty percent of the camp population worked in the mines, most of them in tunnels deep underground. They extracted the coal, loaded coal and coal dust on carts, pushed them up out of the shafts, and took the empty or gearloaded carts back down. The prisoners spent nearly all their shifts wielding Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 51 4/11/2014 2:48:58 PM 52 ||| A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz picks while lying on their bellies in narrow tunnels just thirty to fifty inches high, or on their knees, with a miner’s lantern clenched between their teeth. Yitzhak Liber, who worked there, later said it was called “walking into the wall” in camp parlance.6 The rest worked at various maintenance and support roles above, in what was called “the yard.” They unloaded boards used as supports in the tunnels, rails and ties for the carts, and other operating equipment. The prisoners were also responsible for keeping the site clean and orderly—a Nazi obsession—and some were used as construction laborers at the camp or at nearby sites such as the Andrez power station in Brzeszcze. In nearly all work details a few dozen laborers were expected to achieve production quotas that normally required hundreds of workers. hgw offered construction services to other companies in the area, most of which were part of the mining and steel concern Deutsche Bergwerks- und Hüttenbau Gmbh.7 Another seventy to eighty prisoners—especially children and teenagers between the ages of thirteen and seventeen—stood on either side of a conveyor belt to sort the coal. They had to pick out the shale from the coal and coal dust. Any of them who could not keep up with the belt’s pace was beaten. Like the adults, they worked in two twelve-hour shifts.8 Professional Polish miners and prisoner foremen, mostly Germans, oversaw the work. Outside the tunnels, the prisoners were guarded by seventy soldiers from the ss, Wehrmacht, camp guards (Werkschutz), and auxiliaries (Hilfswachmannschaft). The prisoners working underground were at least, most of the time, out of sight of the ss and their fellow soldiers, who descended into the tunnels only for spot checks to ensure that the prisoners were working according to the rules and meeting the quotas set by the mine’s professionals. With rare exceptions , the German overseers treated the Jews badly, sometimes thrashing them for no reason. As the end of the war approached, members of the prisoner underground tried to indicate to those who beat, humiliated, and mistreated them that they should give some thought to the accusations they would face after liberation. The professional administrator of the mine and its support services was a German named Otto Heine.9 Several witnesses later...

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