eling fairly fit after my two months' rest; and this rest was
all that saved my life. But during that first day I didn't mind the
work so much, I could stand it anyway, but when night came it was awful
beyond description. The heat of the closed ovens was bad enough, but
at night, when the coke in the ovens was sufficiently baked, they
opened the huge doors and the burning mass was pushed out by machinery.
It came out a solid lump just the shape of the oven, and the heat it
threw off was terrific. Two or three big "square-heads" stood near
with iron forks fourteen feet long, and with these they prodded the
mass until it broke into pieces. When it first broke it burst into
flames, but gradually it cooled, and finally they finished it by
turning the water hose on it. But the Germans who attended to this
looked like skeletons--the gas and heat seemed to have eaten the flesh
from their bones and they seemed scarcely human. I was working near
and the fumes of gas and the awful heat was almost more than a human
being could stand. I looked around at the prisoners; and such a
sight--they were toiling like galley slaves, their faces were streaked
with soot and sweat till you couldn't tell whether they were black or
white. I'll never forget the horror of that first night on the ovens,
I was almost dead long before I had finished shovelling my sixty-four
tons of coke, but the awfulness of the scene was harder to bear than
the pain of my body. I said to Mac, "What does this remind you of,
Mac?" He said, "Jack, it's more like hell than anything that was ever
imagined or painted."

We were almost insensible when at last our work was finished; but we
had to keep at it as long as our brains were strong enough to force our
bodies to move. I saw what the weaker ones got, and that was enough
for me. Those inhuman devils with their boasted German culture--a
disgrace to everything that God has created--would drag these poor
quivering, fainting creatures, pleading for mercy--right up to those
red-hot ovens, and at the point of a bayonet force them to stand in
that withering heat till they fell unconscious. Then the guard would
drag them away and make two of the other prisoners carry them back to
the barracks.

What I have described is a sample of what my days and nights were like
on the coke ovens, till I made my final escape two months later. I
played out several times, and each time I was roasted alive before the
ovens. Onc