Kraków, 11 June 1945. Prosecutor Wincenty Jarosiński, a member of the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi-German Crimes in Auschwitz, interviewed Stanisław Jabłoński, former Oranienburg concentration camp prisoner no. 128,286, as a witness.
The witness testifies:
My name is Stanisław Jabłoński, born on 31 May 1904 in Kraków, son to Edward and Katarzyna née Czyżowska, Roman Catholic, master carpenter, of Polish nationality
and citizenship, place of residence Czyżówka 29 Street.
On 2 July 1944 there were mass arrests in Kraków, during which I was apprehended. Three German policemen and one Gestapo man entered my apartment on Czyżówka 29 Street through the windows, and having read my surname from a piece of paper, ordered me to get dressed and come with them. They also took my brother Adam, supposedly as a witness in the case against me.
I was taken to the police station on Zamojskiego Street, and then, along with a bigger group, we were taken to Płaszów camp by car. I was arrested at night. On that day, around two thousand people were arrested in Kraków and its surroundings, and all of them were gathered in the camp. We had to stand in a field until morning, and then we were put into barracks. For two days we didn’t get anything to eat or drink. We were fed only by the people from outside and by our Jewish fellow prisoners. Both groups did so despite it being forbidden by the camp authorities, exposing themselves to being abused in various ways.
We were kept in the camp for a week without being interrogated at all, or rather the interrogations began after three days but I was interrogated on the eighth day. On 9 July 1944, I was summoned to the office, and that’s where the interrogation took place. It was conducted by four Gestapo men, naked from the waist up due to the blistering heat. The interrogation went as follows: the Gestapo were insisting that I was a lieutenant, or rather an officer of the Armia Krajowa, and that I knew organization members, their nicknames, where they were hiding arms and ammunition. I was denying all this. After drawing up a protocol, they started interrogating again. They asked me if I was a part of the organization, and when I denied it, I was handcuffed with American cuffs, a so-called mask was put on my face and I was beaten recklessly with sticks over my whole head and body, and then asked more questions. I was denying all the foisted charges as long as I was able to bear the pain. When I felt I was passing out and that I was going to be killed if I kept denying, I confessed that the weaponry was hidden in my workshop, which was not true. The Gestapo men got dressed, took the mask off my face and put me into a car handcuffed, and we went to Czyżówka Street. When we arrived, they told me to show them where the weapons were hidden. When I explained to them that I had only pointed to this place as a result of the beating and to avoid being beaten more, they ordered me to get back into the car at once. Already on the way, one of the Gestapo thugs punched me in the face so hard that the blood splashed all over. Because the car wasn’t roofed and I was bleeding, they told me to cover my face with a hat.
After being brought back to the camp I was led into the room where the initial interrogation had taken place. Right at the door, one of the Gestapo men kicked me and I fell on the ground. Then all four of them started beating me with the sticks and kicking me all over my body. This torture lasted for an hour. I was beaten for so long that I passed out and then I was thrown out in the fields. After I regained consciousness, I recognized my brother in the group I was in. He told me that the Gestapo had beat him and forced him to confess to being a member of the AK and to confirm I was in the AK too. They were telling him that I had confirmed these facts. The fellow prisoners from that group told me that we were going to be moved to Montelupich prison. As a result of the beating, I was severely ill for a couple of months and my left arm was paralyzed. On the same day, that is, 9 July 1944, I was transported by truck in handcuffs, along with the others, to Montelupich prison. When we came there, we were lined up in the courtyard facing a wall and heard the click of the guns unlocking. My colleagues fell on their knees, prayed, and cried, but I – being absolutely wrecked – just didn’t react. After spending an hour in the courtyard, we were placed in the prison’s basements. A couple dozen prisoners were put into each room and we stayed there until the next morning, 10 July. Before we went inside, I and a certain colonel from the WP [Polish Army] were beaten with batons by a Ukrainian SS man, I don’t know what for.
I spent about two weeks in Montelupich. By the end of July, they started emptying the prison, some of the inmates being released, many shot, and others – including me – transported to Gross-Rosen by train. Around a thousand prisoners were sent there, loaded into wagons, 120 people each. Gestapo men from Pomorska Street were with us, escaping from Kraków.
We arrived in Gross-Rosen after three days, at five p.m. We were told to get off quickly and then we were rushed to the concentration camp, which was situated two kilometers from the camp.
When we passed through the main gate, the Gestapo and SS were already awaiting us. They beat us with whips and sticks and kicked us all over our bodies, without the slightest reason. Many of us were wounded. Then, also taking some blows, we were hustled to the roll call square. There were tables there, at which the elder prisoners were recording our personal data. Each of us received a number, which was hung on our neck, and then we were ordered to strip and go to the bathrooms, throwing our clothes and underwear on a pile and leaving our shoes tied together before that. The registration process took until morning. I was admitted into block 9 at 5 a.m. The Gross-Rosen camp consisted of around 20 blocks at the time. Later, new ones were built. The number of prisoners was around 13 thousand, constantly growing. The block elder at block 9 was a German. He was relatively bearable, but he had Iwan, a Soviet POW, and Zakrzewski from Kraków, a lawyer with an unfinished degree, as his sztubowi. They were evil people, savage beasts. They tortured prisoners no matter what their age, and their specialty was kicking in the stomach and in the genitals. Those two robbed us of food with no remorse, stole our extras and then sold them or gave them away in exchange for services. They were homosexuals, and they were using a young boy, also a Pole, for these purposes. The boy – using the power of his protectors – harassed other prisoners, especially the intelligentsia. He used to beat even the senior prisoners brutally (with a whip).
Although the food we were given was really thin, it could have satisfied our hunger if we hadn’t been robbed of it. The hygienic conditions were terrible, because a thousand prisoners would be put into one block which couldn’t fit that many. There were no beds at all. We were sleeping on pallets, on the ground. There were fleas, lice and it was very dirty, the straw was really worn out, and we could only sleep in a curled position, on just one side. We could turn over only on command. You couldn’t really even dream of sleeping, only about napping, as the night was the only time we were allowed to take care of our bodily needs. Even though there were lavatories in the block, they weren’t enough for such a number of inmates and they were closed throughout the day.
Our work comprised of carrying rocks from the quarry to the construction sites of the new blocks. The kapos in that group were plain criminals, Germans, who were viciously harassing us. If we took a smaller rock, they would beat us for carrying too little, and if we took a huge rock, they would beat us too, ordering us to carry smaller ones. I spent nine days in that block, and then it was emptied, awaiting the transports from the Warsaw Uprising. I got into working block no. 20. The Stubedienstem there was a Pole from Poznań, Leon Szwadra. He was an absolute scoundrel, who used his power in the common room, torturing fellow prisoners, especially Poles.
After a three-week stay in Gross-Rosen, because I was a professional I was moved to Owińsk (Treskau near Poznań). There was an SS Junkerschule, where volksdeutsches and Ukrainians were educated. There were a hundred of us working there. We lived in basements, poorly ventilated with small windows 40x40 [centimeters] in size. We usually worked at construction sites. The chief of that outpost was the Lageralteste, a German, a man exceptionally vicious and a murderer, surnamed Szpinak. Before my arrival at the subcamp, out of a group of 100 people he had murdered 80. Szpinak had his throat slit by a young Russian, an inmate who took revenge for his companions’ misery.
I stayed in Owińsk until 20 January 1945, when, due to the approach of the Soviet army, we were transported to Oranienburg by train. We were placed in block 38, the muslims block. The block elder, not wanting us to become muslimized, and realizing that they wouldn’t survive anyway, stole food from them and gave us bigger portions. The muslims had to work too. They were busy ripping off wires from old electrical or phone cables. They were dying in masses. The corpses, just like in Gross-Rosen, were burned in crematories. In Gross-Rosen, there was one permanent crematory and another mobile one. In Oranienburg there was also a gas chamber.
Whether there were more crematoria, I don’t precisely know. I know from other prisoners’ accounts that bodies were also burned in ditches and gassed in gas chambers, but I’m not aware how many of them there were.
We spent two weeks in that block, busy with the same work the muslims were doing. After that time, I went to block 29, to the Ballonbau komando.
In Oranienburg there were two camps – the small and the large one. In the large one, there were 62 sleeping barracks alone. The work varied: apart from the usual camp work, the prisoners worked at construction sites, road renovations, shoemakers’, tailors’, and carpenters’ workshops, which completed orders for the army. They also worked on unloading commodities, food supplies, and cattle robbed from occupied Europe. The so-called Waldkommando was employed in the latter, whose responsibilities included moving the goods deep into the forests and hiding them.
There were two hundred prisoners working in the Ballonbau komando. We were living in the camp, and walked 1.5 kilometers to work. The worksite was fenced just like the camp. Our work consisted of building and repairing barrage balloons and building containers for the soil gas. Prisoners of various nationalities were employed there, but young Russians above all. The work was overseen by three Germans, one of whom had Swiss citizenship. He was a good man, while the other two directors were handling us brutally. The people actually directing the works were the incarcerated Polish engineers. We worked in huge barracks, ten people each, divided into expert groups working in their own section. I was working at repairing crates. Though the working conditions were not bad relatively speaking, since we weren’t beaten like in the camp, the food rationing was terrible. We would get coffee for breakfast, and initially 250, then 150 grams of bread per day, no dinner, and a liter of a thin soup for supper. We were working very hard, 12 hours a day. Franciszek Muczyński from Orzechówka, Augustów district, was working with me, [later] he had to stay in the camp due to an illness. Tadeusz Rychliński from Prokocim, who moved west, Franciszek Wołek from Izdebnik, Andrzej Korzeniak from Podgórze (Serkowskiego Street) – he had been feeling very bad and I don’t know what happened to him – Franciszek Szczypiński from Czerwony Prądnik (moved out west) and others, whose surnames I don’t recall and only know by their first names.
While I was staying in Oranienburg, we survived two massive bombing raids, in which the camp suffered as well. Only three barracks burned down, there were no casualties as everybody was out working. The Americans were bombarding during the day, flying over with a huge number of planes. After two bombings, all that remained of the Oranienburg factories was rubble, and two thousand prisoners working there died, including three hundred women. Why the Ballonbau wasn’t bombed, we didn’t know, but we supposed it wasn’t that important industrially.
In winter 1944/1945 transports of prisoners from other camps were coming to Oranienburg. They were transported in open wagons in spite of the heavy frost. I saw with my own eyes how such a cargo of prisoners was unloaded. There were wagons with not a living soul, only corpses, and there were some with few survivors, suffering from frostbite. I know from other prisoners, that there had been more of such transports. The corpses of the people who froze to death were thrown out and piled up, moved to crematories and burned.
On 21 April 1945 there was an evacuation of the Oranienburg camp. The prisoners were told to get up early in the morning, each was given a loaf of bread and a piece of sausage and we were herded towards Lubeka in groups of five hundred, escorted by SS men and German prisoners. The sick had been taken from the hospitals before, but we didn’t know where to. Some people said gas chambers, some claimed they had been moved to other camps. Our transport was intercepted by the US Army on 2 May 1945, in Schwerin, Mecklenburg. German hurried us on the way, hoping to be taken into American custody before the Soviets got to them. Because of the hastened pace, beating, and exhaustion, many of the prisoners died on the way, and many were shot by SS men. There were massive shootings. The SS would execute anybody who wasn’t able to walk. The path led through forests, and we were being watched by American aircrafts. 24 April 1945 we encountered Canadian Red Cross members, who had been looking for prisoners in the forest and supplying them with food. Thanks to the intervention of the group’s chief, we avoided further shootings carried out by the Germans escorting us.
On 2 May our escort, having lined up in rows, set off to face the American soldiers. They were intending to surrender, having left us in the forest without supervision. We went towards Schwerin too, where we encountered the American army. We supplied ourselves with food on the way, taking it from cars left behind by the Germans. There were thousands of them. We were lucky, because we met lots of Poles in the American camp, who welcomed us warmly, kissed us and furnished us with everything they could.
We were quartered in Schwerin and we could spend as much time there as we needed. I was there for three weeks, and then received an authorizing document which allowed me to get back home safely. Everybody could receive such a document at any time, freely choosing the direction they wanted to go – west or east. I set out to my family in Kraków, where I am still residing. I had no trouble on the way, no problems from authorities of any kind.
The report was hereby ended, and signed as being compliant with witness Stanisław Jabłoński’s testimony after being read out.