On 4 April 1946 in Chełm, the Municipal Court in Chełm, in the person of Judge S. Antonowicz, interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having advised the witness of the criminal liability for making false declarations, of the wording of Art. 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and of the significance of the oath, the judge sworn the witness in accordance with Art. 111 points 1 and 2 of the Code of the Criminal Procedure. The witness then testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Kazimierz Krysa |
| Age | 46 |
| Parents’ names | Ignacy and Józefa |
| Place of residence | Chełm, [...] |
| Occupation | worker at PKP [Polish State Railways] |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
On 28 April 1942, at 5.00 a.m., I was arrested in Chełm by an agent in plain clothes, Szymański – a 48-year-old man of medium height, who had dark hair and spoke Polish, and by a Gestapo officer in uniform – a tall, blond-haired German who spoke Polish and whose father-in-law was Malinowski, a pointsman at PKP, residing in Chełm. I was escorted to the prison in Chełm. Several days later, I was taken by a prison guard who was a Gestapo officer to the Gestapo headquarters located in the railway administration block for an interrogation. During the interrogation, one of the Gestapo officers, a tall, brown-haired, 38-year-old man who spoke only German, hit me twice in the face. I fell down, he kicked me once, and then I was escorted back to prison. I was charged with being a member of PPS [the Polish Socialist Party], “Strzelec” [Riflemen’s Association], leaving my post at PKP and escaping from captivity. While I was in prison, I wrote a letter to my family, for which I was detained in a dark cell. For a week I was given food once a day. A tall, blond Gestapo officer hit me in the head with a plaited whip four times so hard that my skin was cut and I was streaming with blood. I was detained in prison until the end of June 1940.
At the beginning of July 1942, I was transferred to Lublin and detained in the Castle for five or six weeks. I was then transported to Auschwitz and had the number 50943 tattooed on my left arm. I was assigned to block 11, the “death block”, where prisoners slept without change of underwear, three people in each bed. We were being bitten by insects, and many of us suffered from typhus. I received fifteen lashes from the block leader Alfred Decker from Wuppertal, a short, blond, shaved, 54-year-old German who hit prisoners hard for the slightest offence, conducted penal exercises, squats, crawling, and leapfrogs – while he beat the prisoners all over the body causing them to die, streaming with blood.
After two months I was assigned to block 8 where I worked loading bread that was to be sent to other camps. I worked from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. The person who abused the prisoners there was the chief Boczar from the Sub-Carpathian region, a tall, blond, 42-year-old Ukrainian man who was very vindictive and who whipped prisoners to death. As punishment for trying to secure half a loaf of bread for the prisoners, a Gestapo officer – a short, brown-haired German whose name I do not know, knocked out eight of my upper teeth with a boot. I did not go to the Revier [camp hospital] when I was sick, because that was where lethal injections were administered. For sitting down during work, I was punished with ten nights in the Stehbunker [standing cell] – I had to spend all night standing up and could not sit down, and in the morning I had to go to work. When I went to relieve myself and failed to report, German block leaders whose names I do not know gave me 30 lashes in the buttocks while I was placed in a special chair where my legs and neck were held by straps.
I saw sick prisoners being escorted by medical orderlies out of the camp hospitals, placed in trucks – in a standing position, as many as could fit in – and sent to the gas chambers in Birkenau. Nobody came back from there. In the camp, a German doctor and two of his assistants ordered male prisoners to march in fives, naked. They selected the weak, wounded, and elderly who were then told to get dressed, and they walked to the gas chamber in Birkenau, escorted by SS men. During my two-year detention, about ten such selections took place. In the winter, during the frost, German block leaders ordered prisoners to strip naked, march to a hot bath and back to the blocks, while their clothes were sent to the gas chamber. All prisoners waited in the blocks naked, shivering from the cold. These baths took place every week. Afterwards, many sick went to the “hospital” and the gas chamber.
After two years I was transferred to Buchenwald. I worked there in quarries, which exhausted me completely. A German doctor declared me unfit for work and assigned me to the block for the disabled. We lay there on the floorboards, in groups of ten, wearing no long underwear, only shirts. They gave us a kilogram of bread per six people and half a liter of swede soup. 30 people died there every day and were taken by those who operated the crematorium. Whenever a disabled man sold or exchanged a piece of bread, the camp police, comprised of Germans and people of other nationalities, beat the disabled man to death.
On 9 April 1945, SS men ordered everyone from the block who was still alive to leave and march in an unknown direction. I hid with two Jews beneath the floor. Starved after four days without food, we were liberated by the American forces on 11 April 1945, at 4.00 p.m.
The report was read out.