The inmates of Camp III – Ciglana were divided into working groups. Leading every group was a person in charge who was selected from the inmates themselves. Each leader was personally responsible to Ustashas for the work in the camp.
There were several working groups, whose total daily numbers of prisoners were about 3.000-4.000. Any inmate who was not assigned to one of the working groups in a short period of time would be taken to Donja Gradina and killed there.
The work was divided into internal and external work. Internal work was carried out in various workshops in the camp, the Chain Factory, the Brickyard, the Factory, the Sawmill, the Economy.
External prison labor consisted of building embankments, building the large wall around the camp, cutting and logging trees, working in the fields of “the Economy.” The work lasted for at least 10 hours a day. The inmates were often killed even during the work day itself. Often a group of inmates who went to work outside didn’t return to the camp as guards killed them on the way back.
The fact that this work played a role in the liquidation of the inmates is demonstrated in the words of surviving inmate Cadik Danon (Cutdown tree of Danon):
“… With a dozen corpses laid crosswise in its flow, the water was stopped, and the Ustashas were screaming at us, requiring us to cover them quickly with earth in order to make the defensive wall. If any of us stopped working for a moment, he would get a terrible hit in the head and fall down. The ones who fell down were immediately covered and packed with earth. That is how we strengthened the dam with bodies…”
The “Dam of Death” which stretches from the Belgrade-Zagreb railway to the left bank of the Sava River, was reinforced with the bones of about ten thousand inmates.