Tag #140336 - Interview #78458 (Heni Szepesi)

And then we got to Lichtenau. There they were frightened of us because of how we looked and they tried to feed us up, because we were put into a munitions-factory, which wasn’t an easy job. At first we had our barracks in Lichtenau and the factory was in Furstenhagen, which is now called Kirschhagen. It was a gigantic, hidden munitions-factory, and we didn’t know – when we went up there along a winding road, we didn’t see anything of the factory but greenery and trees. It was completely hidden underground. It was very hard work, because grenade-making was going on there, which had different working phases. I got into the foundry, which meant that we had to stand on a platform – there were about six of us there, in a circle – imagine a gigantic boiler, in which there was yellow TNT powder, which had to be boiled. Then it had to be poked. It was horrible work, everybody was yellow, we looked terrible. And there were three shifts: day-, midday- and night-shift. There were no shoes, we walked to and fro in wooden clogs – there was a six-kilometer road from the railway-station to the factory – and we were very happy when we found a newspaper somewhere, which we could use to wrap our feet. It went on like this until the 29th of March.