“At first, they sent me to a room that belonged to the second area in Spaç, which dealt with the extraction of pyrite, and from there, the next day, they gave us a pair of boots and a pair of brown clothes, we were sent to work, at the second area. The working conditions there were extreme because… the acid, the stench of the acid burned your nose when you went up to the second area and the closer you got, when you passed by the galleries, they gave off steam because the temperatures outside were lower than inside.
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The food was rancid. It was… in the morning you had rice or different soups. It was soup with dried cabbage or dried spinach, or dry leeks, when the dish was first separated from the pot, the worms would be removed, so that the food could be distributed among the plates of all convicts, who were divided as eight people per table. In a word, it depended on the shift we had: first, second, third, and there was breakfast. When we came, we had rice, as a soup of course. Even at dinner we had tea and apple marmalade, breakfast and milk. Powdered milk that was eaten by the guards too, the convicts who were inside also ate. With this we had to do eight wagons, two sets of troops and a pair of tracks. This was to reach the 100 percent quota.