Warsaw, 12 July 1947. A member of District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, Acting Judge Halina Wereńko, interviewed the person named below as a witness, without an oath. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and the obligation to speak the truth, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Henryk Władysław Sadkowski, former prisoner no. 11,670 of the concentration camps in Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald and Ebensee |
| Parents’ names | Tomasz, Aleksandra née Jabłońska |
| Date of birth | 28 November 1889, in Zabrodzie, Radzymin district |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Żelazna Street 18, flat 9 |
| Education | Political and Social Sciences Faculty in Warsaw |
| Occupation | Chief Director of the National Pensions Institute |
On 12 June 1944, I was taken by the Gestapo from my apartment in Warsaw, Sosnowa Street 12, in connection with the murder of a gendarme committed by my son Witold, 22 years old, near Mińsk Mazowiecki. During the conducted search, a lot of incriminating evidence was found. My wife and I were transported to the Gestapo headquarters at Szucha Avenue 25. After four days I was sentenced to death and moved to Pawiak prison.
On 30 July 1944, prisoners of Pawiak, apart from the ill (including Professor Loth and “Ania”, a dentist, among others), were evacuated to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. The transport consisted of 1.2 thousand men and around four hundred women. From Pawiak we were rushed on foot to a siding in the ghetto, where a train had already been awaiting us. We were tied up in twos with wire for the duration of the march. Due to the insufficient number of wagons for Pawiak’s evacuation, a hundred people and a few dozen more were squeezed into each one. The one I was locked in contained 134 men. The women were loaded into wagons at the front, only 75 each. German female doctors were traveling with them, so they even got water to drink during the trip. The women’s cargo was detached in Ostrów Wielkopolski and went to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück, while men were taken to the concentration camp in Gross-Rosen. But at that point, we were heading into the unknown. We weren’t given any water to drink. The windows were boarded up. Stifling because of the heat and lack of space, we were cutting holes in the sidewalls and in the floor with our penknives. The train waited around on sidings for the whole day at Gdański Railway Station. On the first day, a couple dozen prisoners suffocated, including Jan Lilpop, Krysik from Jabłonna, and eight young boys from Kołbiela. Near Włochy, the train was stopped, a few prisoners were taken out, including me, and were asked to move the corpses of the suffocated prisoners to the first wagon. We moved 45 bodies then. Having reached Żyrardów, the overall number of the prisoners who suffocated exceeded two hundred. The corpses, piled up in one of the wagons, were left in Skierniewice. Later I heard that they were burned. Several prisoners went mad during the journey. They were finished off later, in Gross-Rosen.
We travelled for four days through Łódź, Kalisz, and Wrocław, to Gross-Rosen. During the journey, once – at Łodź station – we were given a cup of black coffee. At the Gross-Rosen station, SS men from the camp were waiting for us. We were lined up in fives and hustled to the camp, four kilometers on foot, staggering. On the way, German people from the nearby villages went outside to see us and threw rocks at us, shouting polnische banditen.
In the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, after they collected our personal data, gave out numbers and bathed us, they squeezed a thousand of us in a single barrack. My number was 11,670. I spent three days in the camp, and then almost the whole Pawiak transport was directed to a Gross-Rosen camp outpost in Brzeg (Brieg), by the Oder.
The komando in Brzeg comprised one thousand men and was involved in building an airport. Upon my arrival, the Lagerführer of the komando in Brzeg was Gustaw Schulz, a German criminal prisoner, extremely cruel towards inmates. He tortured prisoners especially during roll calls, beating them to death.
I had seen Schulz murder prisoners many times, I do not recall the surnames of the victims as of now, however.
More details about the camp, especially regarding personal data, can be provided by Kazimierz Sochowiak, currently a judge in the Court of Appeal in Poznań, who was the clerk (Schreiber) in the camp. Sochowiak could also provide the address of Kamiński, a literary man who had spent a few years in the Gross-Rosen camp and had been a writer for some time. After two or three months, Schulz was ordered back to Gross-Rosen and the Lagerführer ’s function was taken over by Robert (I don’t recall the surname), a German criminal prisoner, who also used to beat prisoners. I didn’t see him murder anyone though.
At the airport construction site, digging and working with the concrete was extremely hard. We worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, watched by the Wehrmacht. I need to mention that the soldiers were treating us in a more humane way than the SS men in Gross-Rosen, that Schulz was sent back because of their intervention, and that the conditions were slightly better in Brzeg than in Gross-Rosen. The ill were always sent back to the Gross-Rosen camp and new prisoners were sent in their place, so that there would always be a number of one thousand men in Brzeg. In the period between 7 August 1944 to 15 January 1945, 48 or 49 prisoners died at work or were beaten to death. The kapos were the ones who beat us, the Wehrmacht soldiers rarely did.
I remember one kapo who tortured and harassed prisoners the most – Henryk Wichura, a criminal prisoner, a Pole from Sosnowiec, son of a shoemaker. He was a young man, around 25 years old, medium-height, blond.
A great burden for the prisoners were the roll calls that dragged on for hours. Typical punishments were the following: driving out the whole block to stay in freezing temperatures outside, sometimes without clothes; penal exercises, for example rolling in the snow or mud. Another punishment was 25 blows with a stick.
There were attempts to escape. Those who got caught were beaten, locked up in the basements, and sent to be finished off in Gross-Rosen.
There was a rewir [infirmary] in the komando, whose head doctor was Jan Łukowski, presently a district railway medic in Błonie. The only way a patient could be admitted into the rewir, though, was to suffer from a very high temperature exceeding 39 degrees.
Dr. Łukowski tried to fake the temperature, he couldn’t always do it, however. As a result, the weak and the ill were hustled to work, being forced to maintain the usual productivity by beating. The corpses of the murdered were buried in the cemetery in Brzeg. The place could be pointed out by mgr Mączka from Katowice, who often transported the bodies.
Among the prisoners within the komando, there was a group of around thirty Soviet army soldiers, mostly from a POW camp in Siedlce (which comprised more than twelve thousand). A group of about thirty POWs was brought to Brzeg as a punishment for conspiracy. They were mostly intelligentsia. They were treated a little better than other prisoners and handled better at work.
Despite the oppression, there was no sense of despair among prisoners. We were helping each other out, we were in touch with the outside world, receiving messages. The electrotechnicians secretly constructed a radio. There was an AK organization in the camp’s premises which stayed in touch with Łódź. The following prisoners who had come from Pawiak stayed in Brzeg with me: Suchowiak, major Jaworski (I don’t know his current address), Kazimierz Krawczyński (currently a secretary in the Mexican legation), Maksymilian Trela (currently employed in the oil industry in Łódź), Mączka from Katowice, engineer Marian Wernik from Koluszki, Rostafiński (a law student, I don’t know his address), Sosnowski (currently employed in St. Joseph’s Hospital on the corner of Emilii Plater and Hoża Street).
On 22 January 1945 the komando was evacuated to the Gross-Rosen camp over four days, partly on foot, and after walking a couple dozen of kilometers, in open wagons. The komando was led by the Wehrmacht, prisoners weren’t shot on the way. I stayed in the Gross-Rosen camp for two weeks. We were crammed into one of the evacuation blocks. The conditions were horrible: lack of space, dirt, lice, cold, food once a day at various hours – sometimes dinner was given to us at 3 a.m. The prisoners were harassed by beating and stepping on their heads while they were resting in the compacted mass. Sicknesses started breaking out. Dr. Łukowski, who came from Brzeg with us, could say a lot about the conditions in the Gross-Rosen rewir, Because of the chaos, I didn’t remember the surnames of the SS men that tortured us, but I can say that they were generally torturing us ruthlessly.
After two weeks, along with 4.5 thousand men, I left for the Buchenwald camp (no. 129,654) under the escort of the SS. The journey lasted three days. On the way, during air raids by the Allies, a couple dozen prisoners died.
In January 1945 in Buchenwald, 3.7 thousand prisoners died, 4.5 thousand in February. I stayed there until the first days of March, when I was taken to the Western Front to work in Bauzug. From a group of five hundred prisoners, 112 made it back to Ebensee. The prisoners died from the Allies’ bombs and bullets, from the heavy labor and the SS’s beatings. In Ebensee, the Germans gathered 18 thousand prisoners, including four hundred Poles. Rusinek was there, among others. The camp authorities decided to liquidate the inmates. On 1 May the prisoners found out from the Polish block seniors that seven cars full of dynamite had arrived at the camp and been deposited in the bunkers. On 5 May, the camp’s commandant ordered everyone to gather on the roll call square, and announced that the Americans were 12 kilometers close and that the camp would defend itself. Bombings were possible, so the prisoners were advised to hide in camp no. 7, where supposedly seven trucks of food supplies had been organized for us. Fearing liquidation, the prisoners rebelled and – disobeying the orders – scattered around the barracks.
On 6 May, we were freed by the Americans. We found out later that the Hitlerite party and the camp’s command had been discussing the matter of the prisoners’ annihilation, and that the command’s decision to get rid of them had prevailed.
I don’t know the camp commandant’s surname.
The report was hereby ended and read out.