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| Like the administration building, the kitchen and the
prison, the laundry was also built of stone. On the ground floor were facilities for
disinfection, with machines for treating the clothing, as well as large rooms with showers. Once a month the prisoners went after supper to the laundry, where their clothes were disinfected by steam. This lasted till midnight. They had to spend the rest of the night on the cold, hard paving in the bath. The large room opposite served for rehearsals of the concentration camp orchestra and on Sundays as a concert hall. The camp band played as the work squads marched out in the morning and returned in the evening. Beside the laundry was a barrack where the striped prison uniforms were washed. After 1943, when large numbers of civilian clothes from Jewish prisoners were brought to the camp, the poorer pieces were given to the prisoners, after stripes had been daubed with oil paint fore and aft, as well as "KL", for "Concentration Camp". The issuing of a camp uniform, prison haircut and numbering were meant to demonstrate to the prisoner right from the start his loss of individuality. Beatings and other forms of humiliation by the SS made it only too clear that he had entered another world. |
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