Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984
Sabotage at the Ammunition Factory
So they used to get milk, we didn't. And they used to give us some milk from uh, from their milk. It was only one German woman who--she didn't believe it when I told her--it was also fore...fore man, I mean, forewoman. And she was very much for, for Hitler and she really hated us. And uh, but he, the man was, was much nicer. And she told me, "You know, all of a sudden I thought I will, I will sabotage something...
Mm-hm.
...you know, I will do everything
Mm-hm.
...wrong. I will"--so I didn't know that it goes under another, another control, you know, so when they came I had cracked a few piece, few pieces, not a few...
Yeah.
...about twenty, twenty-four pieces. And she told me, "You know that this is sabotage," and she showed me the poster, and said "This you, you, this is, you know, you deserve death." I said, "It doesn't matter, you know, where I come from." I said, "Death here or death there, I mean, it's the same thing." "What do you mean?" So I started to tell her about Auschwitz and she didn't believe it. She said, "No it's not true, no it's not true." So, there people were not told. But on the other hand, I don't think that they, they didn't--I mean, they didn't know maybe exactly what was going on in those camps because they're not in the towns, you know, they're far away from the town. But when you see hundreds of women going to work with shaved heads, you know, with ??? or rags what they have on. And they had, we had a big, big white cross, you know, painted on the back, because if you run away to be able to uh, I mean to spot you because our hair started to grow--you don't ask yourself what, where are they from, what happens to them, you know. So uh, maybe, you know, I don't know, in some places they really didn't, didn't know what, exactly what was going on, but uh, we were, we were hundreds of prisoners worked in this town in different factories...
Sure.
...you know, and they had their own people there too. So it was not that we were, you know, with two work in a certain place. We were completely isolated. And we were in R...in Reichenbach. Reichenbach was the best place in which I was due to the fact that uh, the work was not so hard. Although there was another, you know, another group of us who, who had to help do the unloading and loading, you know, metals and so on from, from the, from the freights. And uh, they, they had, you know, frozen hands and...
Yeah.
...frozen feet and, feet and uh, it was, it was very, very hard...
Yeah.
...for them. It was very hard for us in the camp, we worked twelve hours in the factory. In the factory it was warm...
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