Sie mit,”665 comes the reply. They tell the soldier aiming at me that I am needed. They are taking me with them. They bring me to a building and tell me to make a list of the men assigned to me today (normally each worker handed his summons to his group commander before starting work, and the latter would make a list on that basis). Seeing my puzzled look, the district commander explains that it is a trick to release us because all other methods of intervention failed. [16] Not even fifteen minutes later, a patrol consisting of two soldiers appeared; they said that one Gruppenführer had bribed a Volksdeutch so that he do writing instead of working, and they are calling the offender to come forward on his own volition. The appeal did not have the desired effect, so the soldiers came back five minutes later with a new announcement: several Poles working in the yard saw a Jew bribe a Volksdeutsch and they are willing to testify who it was; they added that I was the suspect and left; eventually, they returned with a third soldier, who [17] approached us, saying: Also ihr seid die Jungen, die nicht arbeiten wollen? Kommt nur mit, ich werde euch richtig schulen.666 He told us to take tools lying on the ground (shovels, pickaxes, spades, etc.) and follow him. But when we were crossing the yard escorted by those three, the siren sounded. No, Kinder, da hattet ihr Glück: Mahlzeit ist Mahlzeit. Wir werden erst nach Mittag üben,667 our would-be teacher said and released us.
Thinking about what awaited me [18] after lunch, I could not swallow a single bite of my food. Besides, I was exhausted to the point that my mouth was too dry to chew. Some of us were in even worse shape, lying on the ground, as if after an epileptic seizure: saliva and foam dripping from their mouths, having fallen where they stood, too weak to stand up and so remaining on the ground even after the break. In these conditions, we were visited by a few more soldiers from a patrol, who behaved very strangely: for example, they offered cigarettes to some of us, while they beat up others for no reason.
[19] After the break, most of us ran off in different directions and joined whichever crews, trying to hurry up before those three came back. I went back to carrying heavy loads because the work itself was not hard for me, and there was no gauntlet there. The beating also became less systematic;
