LIVING HISTORY
53
very cold. We worked 12-hour shifts with no breaks and no food
during work.”
DEADLY SITUATION
According to Brolmann, some of his co-workers died in factory
accidents. One fellow, he says, drank some of the machine
fluid and died. The Germans shot a lot of the workers who tried
to go back home and were caught.
After working in Braunschweig from May 14 until Aug. 1,
1943, Brolmann and the others were sent to Uslar where they
assembled ammunition boxes.
“We sabotaged a lot,” he says. “Then we had to remake
them. Everybody slept together in a barracks at the forced
labor camps, with three layers of bunk beds. There were a lot
of Catholics and they would let us go to Mass in the town and
sometimes we would gather to say the rosary. We would pray
that we would be able to return home soon.”
He and the others were next sent to the town of Herzberg am
Harz, where they worked in a bomb-making factory. This was
the worst of his internments, Brolmann says. They were there
from November 1943 until May 1945 and there was an everpresent
danger of chemicals at this plant.
“There were a lot of poisons and the air was hard to breathe in
some places,” Brolmann remembers. “Your lips and hair would
turn blue.”
At one point, the workers had to put a new roof on the factory.
It was a gravel roof and they had to carry buckets of hot tar
weighing about 80 pounds up tall ladders, three stories up.
“I don’t know how I survived that,” Brolmann says. “I was always
small and that work was very hard. Sometimes if someone
wavered on the ladder, hot tar would spill on the workers below >>
ANTHONY INSWASTY
John Brolmann spent 31 years of his life working as a botanist for the
University of Florida research center in Fort Pierce. His yard reflects
his love of plants and his ability to nurture them.
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