Tag #139586 - Interview #101729 (Bella Steinmetz)

We worked twelve hours, and we had that luck that it was warm in the factory. We made aircraft parts for Messerschmidt aircrafts. It is a world-famous brand. They brought smaller or bigger automatic machines from Czechoslovakia, they were already installed in the factory. I could say I had luck here, that I had quite an easy work. For example my friend had bad luck, she had to make big bolts. This meant that she had to install iron of two kilos on the machine. Mine was a small bolt, I had to fix the machine with that. They didn’t really control us. But the German supervisor said, ‘Pay attention to work accurately, otherwise I will transfer you to the heavy machine, to the «schwere Maschine»!’ I had a Polish Vorarbeiter, a foreman who taught me how to handle the machine, and who was responsible for me. He was a Christian Pole, they were taken from Poland, France, Italy, because they were against Hitlerism. They were gathered and transported to Germany for free work. However, we heard that they lived in better conditions, it was warm in their block. They lived somewhere else, not among Jews. They got little money, so they could buy a shaver, they could buy a piece of soap, they had water. So they looked more civilized, because they could get shaved.