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8 Reichenbach and Four Other Lagers Reichenbach, also called Langenbielau, the camp to which we were brought, was a satellite camp of Gross-Rosen. Bleak, deserted brick barracks looked uninhabited , but we discovered that we shared them with some Dutch women and girls who were already working for Telefunken. These women were originally employed by the electronics firm Philips in Holland. The barracks were extremely cold, and while there were inside washrooms, the latrines were some distance away in the open. A day after our arrival, we were marched to the Telefunken factory, where we were first tested and then divided into work groups and shifts. Eva worked day shifts in a room together with just one somewhat older girl from Slovakia. The two of them had to monitor the temperature of several ovens in which glass tubes were heated and pressurized. They were continuously on the run, apparently because if an oven got overheated, the tubes would explode. As soon as they had checked and adjusted one oven, they hurried to the next. According to Eva, this had to be accomplished at a very fast pace. It is interesting to think that the tests the Telefunken people gave us—whose content I cannot recall—must have revealed Eva’s quickness and mental alertness. I got work in a quality-control section and alternated weekly between day and night shifts. Sitting in a row at long tables, we had to check the filaments for newly manufactured (radio?) tubes. The filaments for these tubes were held in front of us on a special fixture. To be perfect, they had to run exactly parallel to each other. I tended to fall asleep at that task since I had trouble getting used to my weekly changing shift. When the German civilian supervisor passed my chair in the row of working prisoners, she thumped me on the back to get me to wake up. Every other week when I worked the night shift, Eva and I saw each other Reichenbach and Four Other Lagers 127 only as our columns passed each other on the road, going in opposite directions. Exposed to the blustery winter weather, we walked what must have been several kilometers. We walked, not quite upright, huddled together. Not one of us was adequately dressed or shod. To defy the elements, some of the girls sang a song with the refrain: “Durch die Hosen pfeift der Wind.” (The wind blows through our pants.) To this day, there is nothing that reminds me of that time like when I happen to feel cold outdoors in winter. We shared our bunk bed with Gisa, one of the young Slovak Jewish women. Dark blond, she was a tall woman with a large angular frame. Most important , she was a very patient person. In Birkenau, she had been in charge of the “sauna” and was housed in a small room adjacent to it. Eva and I thought that the prisoners herded into those shower rooms were not taken there to shower but to be gassed. But Gisa said that she had to stoke the ovens, presumably for warm water. That sauna may have been a delousing facility. (At that time the SS guards worried about the lice that infested the prisoners’ clothes because the typhus this vermin carried could spread to them also. Later in the war they were less fastidious because we were all covered with lice during the final months.) Gisa was a girl whose age I could not even guess; she spoke so little. She made the impression of a very quiet, resigned person. We did not ever discover her last name. She had been in Birkenau for more than two years, and we could not come close to know how she must have suffered during that time. In Reichenbach , Gisa and Eva worked the same day shift, so that I had the bunk to myself when I worked nights. I had more space, but I was colder, and I felt alone. After about a month of work, I felt a bad pain in my right side. I thought I had a fever. I went to the sickroom to speak to the woman physician in charge. She took one look at me and decided that I had jaundice. Apparently I was yellow. I hadn’t known because there were no mirrors; neither Eva nor Gisa had noticed, probably because we rarely saw each other in daylight. There was no thought of the special...

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