Our Factory

“Our” factory, where we lived until 1915, was for me a great attraction, where I went again and again and prowled around. At that time I said that I knew the factory better than my father, the director. Even today, after 65 years, everything remains clear, even if I understood a lot of things better at a later time after I studied Chemistry

The beginning of the production was starch, also called potato flour, which were delivered in heavy sacks on carts that were pulled by two horses. There were whole columns of these carts and the sacks were stored in warehouses on the east side of the area. Mr. Wieting, the manager, had the job to control all the deliveries. The sacks made a grinding sound when they were moved and the warehouse smelled vaguely sour. On a cement track, a worker drove the sacks from the warehouse to the mixing room and into the mixing machine, a large kettle with stirrers that was set into the floor. There the starch (a polysaccharide) was mixed with water and thinned sulfuric acid into a thin mush. It was fun to watch the agitated, white liquid. The liquid went from there into a converter that was heated with steam and where the polysaccharide was being split into simple sugar (glucose) through the sulfuric acid. After that the sulfuric acid was precipitated using lime. The gypsum that originated from this process was filtered using larger vacuum filtering presses. The clear liquid was then boiled down. This all happened in a two-story factory building.

When one entered, one noticed first the big steam engine that transferred power to all the machines by use of belts. The factory had not been electrified. Even in the city there was no electric company. Thus the steam machine was the focus of everything. A large kettle on the left was the converter, next to it where a series of pumps that looked like the steam machine, but where driven by a belt. They created the vacuum that was used to move the liquid from one apparatus to the next and through the filters. At the back were the filtering presses, heavy, iron boxes, in which iron frames that had been covered with thick linen clothes were pressed together. After each filtration, they all were screwed apart and the gypsum was scraped off the clothes. A worker drove the gypsum to the gypsum hill.

In the middle of the room an iron staircase led to the second story, where the liquid was thickened. The liquid moved through the vacuum chambers, big circular containers, where inside the steam circulated through pipes and in the vacuum, the water evaporated. Through a looking hole one could watch the steaming. Here, the engineer had his place, where he controlled the process by taking samples. The samples were put onto a cooking sheet and heated for a certain time over an alcohol burner. If it was a colorless, clear, and hard caramel, the syrup was done and was sent into the bottling vats. These samples, that were kept, were the best sweets for us. Up here the engineer and I would be sitting and playing, disturbed only now and then by taking the samples.

On the side of the factory was the kettle house that supplied the steam. A stoker put large pieces of wood into the furnace beneath the large kettle. The wood was outside stacked against the wall.

Of particular importance for me was also the workshop in another room. First there was a smithy, where I hammered myself sabers made from the metal hoops that came around the barrels. After that came the big workroom with the large metal lathe, which was taboo for me. But on the workbench was a small vise for me, where I could create all kind of things while standing on a box. After that came the carpenter shop, the realm of Nagorski, where I had a small planer and was introduced to carpentry. On the edge of the plot, next to the Igumenski tract, was the coopers’ workroom, where three or four coopers made all the needed barrels. The staves of the barrels where material for several wooden swords for me and the metal hoops were used for sabres.

Next to the workrooms, Mama had a hothouse with three large rooms that was heated using the steam from the factory. There Mama could cultivate some frost sensitive plants. Later on it was also used as winter house for several different songbirds. In the spring Mama would set all of them free.

Now let me say a few words about Minsk before World War I. Minsk was the capital of the government district of the same name. Ethnically it belonged to White- or Small-Russia and is now the capital of Belarus. The population was about one third Russian, one third Polish, and one third Jewish. The official language and the one spoken in company was of course Russian, the white Russian population spoke a dialect, which we children of course understood, but did not speak. The Polish population was an upper group of estate owners and intellectuals, but also some working class people. For instance, our nanny Franja was Polish; she took us with her to the Catholic Church. Polish and Catholic were pretty much synonymous. Of more importance was the Jewish population, who completely controlled commerce. The Jews in Minsk spoke Yiddish, a language that originated from the medieval German and therefore we could understand it. The owners of the big shops were Jewish, for instance Kaplan, who besides furniture and office supply had wonderful toys like tin soldiers or dolls on the top floor. Kreindel had fruit and the best fruit from the south. We called the Jewish wine store “Get Madeira, get Schampanski”, because the orders were called like that into the basement. At Limone Mama bought linen and such things.

For our factory we also had a Jew, Mr. Gorfinkel, who brought the mail in the morning, went to the bank, and ordered the train wagons for the syrup; he organized everything that had to do with money or needed some bargaining or bribing. That was important in the Russia of that time. During Passover, my parents paid them a return visit in for their visits to our holidays. Thus as a small boy I visited an orthodox Jewish home, where the Tora was in a box over the door and Mr. Gorfinkel wore the black and white prayer stole and the phylactery on the arm. We got Matzo, thin wafers from unleavened bread, which we liked very much. Gorfinkel’s had a boy in my age, who was named Zoddik and with whom I liked to play. Mary told later, that after returning from one of these visits I once said: “Zoddik is a Jew, but he is also a human.” Through this association with Russian, Poles, and Jews our love for our German heritage was strengthened, although one recognized the equality of all people. This may have helped us in later times to not succumb to racial hatred.