One day the foreman came to my workbench and said he had another job for me. I was to drive an electric cart. For that, you didn't need a driving license, which I would never have been given in any case. The speed of the cart was limited to 8 kilometers an hour. It was fueled by batteries that had to be recharged every night. The charging unit was in the boilerhouse and I spent my time in there when I wasn't actually driving. I had got some basic instructions from my predecessor, who had just been called up. In the factory area and at the nearby Lichterfelde goods station, I had to use the cart to pull wagons full of materials back and forth, shift heavy objects, and fetch the meals for the workers in big pails from the works kitchen in Rummelsburg.

That had positive consequences for one of my problems, the constant hunger. The workers’ meals were provided by a private firm of sausage-makers which had taken over the functions of a works kitchen. The owners, a couple called Weihrauch, also had a shop where they sold meat and sausage goods. There was a bakery nearby and I was often asked to take the odd sack of flour over. Then there was always a piece of bread for me, sometimes even a whole loaf. The hot food was transported in different kinds of pails. The large ones were so heavy when they were full that one man couldn't lift them. For that job I was assigned a so-called Ostarbeiter – Wassili – who normally worked as a maintenance man around the plant. We enjoyed our work. Before the pails were filled we had already eaten our share.

After the devastating attacks of the British long-range bombers in November 1943, which completely destroyed Berlin's west end, mainly through fire, the Allied bombing intensified significantly in the course of the winter of 1943–44. Barely a day or a night passed without an air raid warning. As soon as the sirens started to howl, everybody ran for the bunkers. And I did too, once.