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In the hospital they changed my bandage every other day, they smeared my leg with unguent, and the swelling went down, only the running sores were on it. When I could already walk the Stubedienst put me to work, to help him. I had to carry bed-slippers and to help the new patients use it. At that time they brought in a lot of non-Jews, but French, who, I don’t know why became suspicious, they put them into the Lager and got a red triangle, they became political prisoners. One day the Stubedienst asked me if I wanted to get half a liter soup more daily. Of course I did. One was always hungry, especially because we didn’t get the bread zulag. He told me, ‘here’s a wire brush and some grease, and out there is the chimney for disinfecting’. It was a huge iron chimney, about 10-12 meters high, which was tied with cables, on a concrete ring put into the ground. They screwed it up, and the bolts were rusty. He gave me a wrench so that I would move the bolts, clean them, grease them and twist them repeatedly. This meant that I had to twist 6 bolts a day, and for this I got half a liter of soup, I was very happy about it. It was a very good job, and though I only had a shirt and a pair of trousers at the hospital, they lent me a striped jacket, so I wouldn’t freeze outside while I did this work. I did it diligently until the 18th January. I only found it out recently, in 1998, at the first reunion of the former Lager inmates, why I had to do this. I had to do it, because the substitute of the barrack commander and some others planned that they wouldn’t let everyone be killed. Because they thought that if the Russians came there, then the Germans would encircle us with machine guns, there were many of us in a small place, and they would have killed us all. And these few people planned that since the 10-12 meter high chimney of the disinfectant stood at 6 meters from the fence protected with current, they wanted to blow it down on the fence and then there would have been a short-circuit, and that would have also torn the fence, and we could have ran away. They made me do this, so that the bolts would have been easy to screw off.
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Ferenc Leicht