Warsaw, 4 January 1946. Judge Halina Wereńko interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having advised the witness of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the gravity of the oath, the judge swore the witness in accordance with Art. 109 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Jan Napiórkowski |
| Age | 24 |
| Names of parents | Czesław and Zofia |
| Place of residence | […] |
| Occupation | a doctor in the Transfiguration of the Lord Hospital |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
During the Warsaw Uprising I was constantly on duty at the Wolski Hospital in Płocka Street 26, in the surgical ward.
During the first days of the uprising, three barricades were erected in Płocka Street, which were attacked by the Germans with the use of armoured vehicles on 2 August 1944 around 10 a.m. from the direction of Wolska Street.
After series of shots from assault guns, the barricades were breached and many wounded from there were brought into the hospital. At the same time the Germans entered. They then talked to the director of the hospital, Doctor Piasecki, they were calming him down saying that nothing wrong would happen to anybody. After that, they left the hospital without any reprisals, despite the fact that there had been insurgents in the hospital. No documents were checked either. That German troop left the hospital in cars and, as we saw, they hurried away in the direction of Górczewska Street herding some Poles in front of them; those were men who had been brought out from the nearby houses to demolish barricades; the Germans were also shooting in the direction of nearby houses.
Throughout 3 and 4 August 1944 we only saw the Germans through the window. During that time people wounded as a result of bombardment or artillery fire were coming to the hospital, but nobody had yet heard anything about executions. Somebody even brought two wounded German soldiers to the hospital at that time.
On 4 August 1944, an insurgent patrol walking down Górczewska Street came under German fire and left two wounded men behind. When a medical patrol, Doctor Krzywiec and a graduate nurse [missing], left the hospital, they were shot at by the Germans, despite the fact that they were unarmed, in white aprons and with the sign of the red cross on their arms.
Starting from 4 August 1944, people began to bring stories of mass executions of civilians and insurgents. The Germans were attacking from the direction of Ulrychów, along Górczewska Street in the direction of the city centre; they were systematically burning nearby houses and bringing their inhabitants out.
On 5 August 1944 between 9 and 10 a.m. the German troops made it to Płocka Street, reached the hospital and did not allow anyone to approach the windows. They did not disturb hospital work.
I heard, I don’t know from whom, that these Germans had supposedly told the director of the hospital that they didn’t know what to do with the hospital, but that the SS would come in the afternoon and put the hospital in order. At that time, apart from the patients and the hospital staff, in the basements there were around one thousand residents of nearby houses who had sought shelter in the hospital.
SS formations composed of “Ukrainian” soldiers and German officers arrived at around 3 p.m. There were more than [missing] of them, heavily armed, with machine guns, ammunition, and every other one of them had a bottle of vodka. These soldiers spread out around the hospital right away.
Two “Ukrainians” went into each ward and announced that that everyone was to leave the hospital immediately; they were threatening that they would burn the hospital down.
This was accompanied by harassment and confusion, the “Ukrainians” were taking away watches and jewellery, swearing and insulting people in the most horrific manner.
I heard from Doctor Woźniewski that at that time Doctor Piasecki, the director of the hospital, had been shot in his office together with Doctor Zeyland and the chaplain, Father Ciecierski.
When that happened, I was in the 6th surgical ward on the second floor.
Two SS-men came here as well and ordered us to go down to the hall with the patients. Patients with more severe conditions found it difficult to drag themselves downstairs. We were ordered to go Płocka Street and lined up in threes in the following order: male hospital personnel was at the front, then the female personnel, male patients, female patients, behind them civilians, first men and then women. The hospital personnel brought with them several stretchers (up to twenty), so the patients with more serious conditions were carried on stretchers. Some of the patients were supported and helped to walk.
Having arranged us into a column, the Germans surrounded us with a convoy and herded us in the direction of Góreczewska Street, and then along Górczewska Street in the direction of Ulrychów.
When the column was turning into Górczewska Street, the SS men pulled out two heavy machine guns and started to fire at Góreczewska Street in the direction of the City Centre. So, they used us as cover.
Walking in the column, I saw the corpses of elderly people, women, children and men left in the street. I saw from ten to fifteen corpses in total. All houses around were on fire.
Having passed the flyover in Górczewska Street, the column was halted and the SS-men ordered us to face a heavy machine gun set up on the street. At the same time Doctor Wesołowski, from the Wolski Hospital, together with Doctor Manteuffel and two operating- theatre nurses were taken by the Germans to a German field hospital which was situated nearby.
Everyone else was brought into the halls of the former railway workshops in Moczydło Street. There the Germans segregated the men from the women, keeping the division into doctors, patients and the locals. Then they demanded through an interpreter that everybody hand over jewellery and weapons.
Later, residents of the houses at Górczewska Street 12, 15, and 17 were brought in groups. The hall was filled with people.
The Gestapo men demanded five men for work.
In the Moczydło halls the SS was replaced by the SD.
After these men had been taken away, we heard machine gun shots. After the shots they demanded another five, then again we heard shots. Then they demanded twenty-five men, and after a while fifty, and this way they had taken all of the men from the hall, apart from the doctors and students, who were standing in a separate group.
After a while an SD-man came in and demanded that all the doctors get out. We went in front of the hall and were lined up in threes. In front of us stood two groups of men lined up in threes, twelve men in each group. Among them I saw a priest and some patients in hospital robes.
My group also numbered twelve men, they were medical students: Opiłowski, Banasiewicz, Mikulski, Łągiewka, Sieragowski, [missing], myself; doctors: Professor Grzybowski, Doctor Sokołowski, Doctor Drozdowski, Doctor Chwojko, [missing] Stanisław Łempicki, a cleric, whose name I don’t know, as well as a priest, whose name I don’t know either. The priest managed to get separated from our group and hide among the hospital’s sisters.
Groups of men that were in front of us were taken to Moczydło Street. A man was separated and left behind, he claimed to be Russian. We were searched once again, they were looking for watches and took them away. One colleague was hit with a riffle butt on the neck for trying to communicate with someone else.
I managed to strike up a conversation with the first of the SD guards. I asked him where we were going and he told me that we were going to a summer camp. When I asked him where the shots we were hearing came from, he said that these were the sounds of the fight with the insurgents, and then he started to tell me about the cruelty of the Polish insurgents who had allegedly burnt down a German hospital near Lardelli’s confectionery in Polna Street. He told me that the Polish intelligentsia had made a huge mistake when they had provoked the uprising, since the Bolsheviks would come and would slaughter everyone anyway.
The groups of men preceding us had left the square in front of the hall and we were ordered to go to Moczydło Street, escorted by two guards. I was the middle man in the first three. Through Moczydło Street we got to Górczewska Street and we walked along this street in the direction of Ulrychów. On the way we met German soldiers (Wehrmacht), who were calling us verfluchte Partisanen, dumme Partisanen.
Having walked some two hundred meters along Górczewska Street, we were ordered to go between burning wooden houses and were halted around thirty meters from the wall of a brick house, whose front was parallel to the railway bank, near the street stretching alongside the back of the railway track (on the extension of Moczydło Street, between Górczewska Street and Koło). By the wall there was already a pile of corpses which were two men thick and one meter high. Men were lying in layers, all of them facing the ground. Many of them were in white aprons or in hospital clothes.
Among the men on the ground I recognized an orderly from the Wolski Hospital, Jan [Augustyniak].
Eight SD-men with hand machine guns stood in front of the bank, probably they were the ones who carried out the execution.
I believe that the executed might have numbered around five hundred.
One of the SD-men waved his hand in our direction, pointing at the corpses. He was encouraging us to climb on top of them.
I then started to escape, running in the direction of the corner of the house before which the execution was being carried out. Behind me I heard yelling in German: “One of them is running away” and before I hid behind the house, I heard two gun shots. I ran along the street parallel to the bank in the direction of a field. Having run for around two hundred meters, I found myself in a tomato field, I hid there and while I was lying down I heard bursts of machine gun fire. Nobody was chasing me and I was not hurt. I took off the hospital apron and after a while I saw people some five hundred meters away from me, walking around calmly. I approached them and having learnt that the neighbourhood was peaceful, I went to my friends in Ulrychów.
On the following day I saw through a window that the entire female hospital personnel was being herded to the camp in Jelonki. I stayed for two days in Ulrychów. I learned that the female hospital personnel had been released and quartered in Jelonki.
At that time members of the “Herman Göring” armoured division stationed in the Ulrychów Gardening Plant [Zakłady Ogrodnicze Ulrychów] and “Ukrainians” in German uniforms were walking around Ulrychów, and under the pretext of an inspection and searching for partisans, they robbed people of their valuables and pulled away girls, who later recounted that they had been raped.
On 7 August 1944, since Ulrychów was under the threat of evacuation, I managed to get to the hospital in Jelonki, where I started to work.
The Germans came to the Jelonki hospital all the time, threatening that should they find any partisans, they would execute everyone. The Mongols stationed in Jelonki, who participated in the struggle for control over Warsaw, were pulling away women and raping them during orgies. I know that from what those women told me.
Two weeks after the execution, two of my colleagues, Doctor Janina Pecyna and a graduate nurse Anna Wielowiejska, managed to get to the execution site which I described, and they found there burnt bones, a stethoscope, and a few pairs of surgical tweezers, white hospital caps.
In October 1944, the house where the execution took place was blown up and presently there is rubble there. In March 1945 I went to the execution site and I saw a lot of human bones there, traces of ashes, keys left by the victims of the murder, and surgical tweezers.
At that the report was concluded and read out.