Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Nathan Roth - February 4, 1983

And then where did you go?

And then, they just uh, told me to go and we went to Jaworzno. It was a satellite camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It belonged to that same group. It was a, it was a camp that um, there were two, two uh, work forces. One worked in the coal mines and one worked in building a um, a huge underground power plant.

Do you know the company you worked for?

Uh, I.G. Farben

So there were civilian...

Oh yeah, yeah. It was I. G. Farben. I don't know. I worked in the coal mines, too, but not for too long. Uh, which was the better job in the coal mines, a little more food for those who were in the coal mines, but uh, I couldn't uh, finagle to stay there long enough and I was put in uh, I. G. Farben, into the, it was a big, huge excavation. It must have been sixty to eighty feet deep and running for acres and acres and at first, I was what they call an Eisenbieger. I worked at a station where I bent the reinforcing steel that goes into the concrete. It had a--they had a template, you know, the steel went in and you put a piece of pipe over it and bend it here and then you had to go here bend it back this way. I did that and then I was transferred to a, what you might call a cushy job. I was supervising pumps in the deepest pit of this excavation that pumped out the underground water to keep it dry and that's where I almost lost my life.