Tag #138691 - Interview #78499 (Bernat Sauber)

In the mine we worked together with the Russian workers. These were regular pitmen, regular miners. Pitmen are the who cave the coal with hackers. They conducted the work, we only were subworkers. Later we came across with the Saxon girls from Segesvar and Beszterce, and worked together with them in that mine. I was 23-24, and a 20 year old girl was working beside me, who was taken to the Soviet Union after the war. We became friends with the Russians, and we gave them presents, because we managed to save some valuables, rings, but especially watches, and the Russians would do anything for a bottle of spirit. We finally managed to meet some very decent people. I had some history with the movement, so I knew what the Soviet Union and who its leaders are. We knew that many of them were Jewish. We began to write letters in Russian, we got them translated by the Romanians from Bessarabia, who were also there in captivity, and the Russian workers mailed them. We explained our situation: we were supervised by Germans, the camp commander was Anti-Semite and that daily there were a number of Jews dying. It wasn't enough that we lost our families in Germany, now the Jewish youth left alive would not go home from there. We wrote to Kaganovich [Kaganovich, Lasar] [13], Ilya Erenburg [14], who was a famous Russian writer, he has some serious novels. He flee the country under the Stalin terror, and lived in Paris for I don't know how many years. Stalin insisted to bring him back and gave him the proper appreciation. Quite a long period has passed – I don't know how long, I think several months –, and we thought our letters never reached the addressees.