The hearing of a witness with regard to crimes committed by the Nazi occupants in Poland. On 5 February 1946, Judge Remigiusz Moszyński, with the participation of a reporter, retired Judge of the Court of Appeal Stanisław Poznański, having advised the witness of the obligation to speak the truth and of the criminal liability for making false declarations, heard the person named below, who answered some general questions:
| Name and surname | Janina Sadzikowska |
| Parents’ names | Franciszek and Józefa |
| Data i miejsce urodzenia | 10 September 1927 in Łódź |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Occupation | housewife, husband works as a shoemaker |
| Place of residence | Lublin, Króla Leszczyńskiego Street 12 |
and testified as follows:
Before the outbreak of the war, I worked in a wool factory in Łódź, where a lot of Germans worked. As a result of the events preceding the war and the anti-German sentiment, the workers and I tried to expel the Germans from this factory, and when the Germans entered Łódź, these Germans – the workers in this factory belonging to Bury – pointed to those who had voted for the expulsion of the German workers, and this included me, as enemies of the German people. Along with some other employees from this factory, I was arrested and imprisoned initially in Łódź, where I spent two years. Then I was transported to Auschwitz. I stayed there for three years, and in August 1944 I was transported to the city of Metz together with 500 other women, to the ammunition factory. After two weeks, we were transported from there to Germany on foot to the village of Döllstädt and during an intense allied raid I fled to the forest together with other friends; I was quickly released by the American army.
When I was in prison in Łódź, I was interrogated and beaten so severely that I was black and blue all over, with blood dripping from my wounds, and two of my teeth were broken to force me to testify. Finally, I was sentenced to be deported to Auschwitz, where the Gestapo said I would die. In Auschwitz, we were forced to work for almost a dozen hours a day in the fields, quarries and during the harvest. We received something resembling tea every day, made from some herbs or just from grass, and half a liter of soup for dinner, actually beetroot water, and a 10–12 gram slice of bread for supper, and that had to last the whole day. We were treated cruelly. Because most of us were exhausted by hunger and work, every time we came back from work, we brought back with us four or five corpses of women who had died during the work.
In the part of the camp where I was staying, the Lagerführerin [camp leader] was a woman named Mandl and the Raportführerin [report leader] was a woman named Drechsel; I don’t know their first names. Both were cruel to the prisoners. They beat at every opportunity, at every encounter, for any slight misdemeanor. They used to beat us with their hands, and when there was some major offense we were ordered to present ourselves at the Lagerführerin’s block and the prisoners would receive punishments consisting of 25 blows to their naked body or kneeling on stones for two or three to five hours. The SS women, escorting the female prisoners at work, set the dogs on them, which ripped into the prisoners’ bodies and severely injured them on several occasions. I can’t give the names of these overseers.
The witness showed a scar on her left hand where an SS woman wanted to tattoo her number 8037 on her arm. She didn’t agree, and then [as she said]:
“She poured petrol onto my arm, set it on fire, and on this scalding she tattooed the above number by force, ignoring my screams caused by the terrible pain. I add that my entire family was deported from Łódź and what happened to them, I don’t know”.