peanutsman

After the war he tried to find his former boss, herr Prauss. He always looked up to him and was grateful for the help and protection he gave my grandfather. It seems that herr Prauss was locked up by the Russians and either died or faded into obscurity as my grandfather could never find him.

My grandfather says that he enjoyed the work itself, as he was a laboratorium assistent in the factory conducting tests for the gasmasks and this was interesting work that was in his field of studies. They were perhaps an exception to the brass of forced labourers as they were treated quite well in the factory. Also, the Auergesellschaft had a lot of wealth and could afford to pay and equip their workers accordingly, but paying them less than the german workers, ofcourse.

By the way: what do you mean with more questions to read up on? Thanks.

"The official working hours were 48 hours a week. We had saturday afternoon and sundays off. Also we had rights for.. I think 7 days of vacation time and on christian holidays we had off also. We were only allowed to travel in the province were we lived/worked so I was allowed to travel in the province of Mark Brandenburg.. which was pretty big.

The situation regarding food was far better than that in the Netherlands.. in the last warwinter (1944) there were some shortages.. we filed a complaint with the factory leaders. The highest boss of the factory came with a skilled worker (who was called Ombudsman!) to discuss the complaint personally with us, after which we were given decent meals again (two hot meals in a day)

As you can see, we as 10 Dutch students at Auer had lucked out immensly, almost all other deported workers had it far, far worse."

How did news about the Normandy Landings circulate?

"I don't remeimber exactly. I think we heard about it three or for days later. We heard about it from the German Communique."

"For the second question, I don't know how to answer that. I am not a philosopher."

"Ofcourse I thought about it. But I didn't have any place to go, didn't know anyone to turn to for that kind of thing. After the war I heard a lot of stories about boys my age that went in hiding and got out of all it that way."

Hello , interesting, was your grandfather present at that raid?

"I think we were just as aware of the progress as the people back in the Netherlands. The communiques of the German Oberkommando were generally pretty reliable and were published in all newspapers and even in small regional newspapers that were distributed until the end of April 1945"