The chronicle of Eger Tobacco Factory
The cigarette factory
After the outbreak of war, the factory became a military plant where military discipline was enforced, holidays were restricted and all efforts were made to ensure the constant supply of cigarettes to the men on the front line. Average output per person for an eight-hour shift was 1,500 Levente cigarettes, in other words more than three cigarettes a minute had to be filled using the primitive hand-filling technique, which survived right up until 1940, when the factory acquired five cigarette machines. In the mid-war years, to be precise in 1942, Adorján Oltványi, who was now running the Excise Office directorate, nominated Géza Vitéz Hollós (Héritz) to the position he himself had once occupied as head of the Eger factory. Oltványi prepared a report on the factory’s staff and equpiment, from which we learn that the factory boasted six clerks, nine sub clerks, five female office workers and two women caretakers. The workers were made up of 47 men and 457 women, altogether making a total of 504, among them one nursing sister, a junior nurse, an under-assistant, nine fire officers and a water officer. In the main factory building, where the actual manufacturing work took place, were three tobacco cutting machines, a sifting machine, five U.M.-type cigar makers, a machine for pulping reject stock, a vacuum cleaning apparatus, a paper cutter and a stem cutter. In addition the factory had its own locksmith, carpenter and mechanic’s workshop. In the locksmith’s workshop there was a blacksmith’s forge, a metal lathe, two knife grinders and a drill. The carpenter’s workshop was equipped with a motor-driven wood-turning machine and a planing machine. The mechanic’s workshop contained a small lathe, a drill and a knife grinder. The factory processed 20 kilos of foreign tobacco and 1,730 kilos of local tobacco every day, from which a daily total of a million Levente cigarettes and 100,000 “Mixed Foreign” and “Faintos” cigars were produced at a value of 38,000 pengős.
