ANTONINA PIĄTKOWSKA

On 20 May 1946 in Kraków, Investigating Judge of the District Court in Kraków with its seat in Kraków, Judge B. [illegible], with the participation of court reporter J. Tuszakowski, heard the person named below as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the wording of Article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the witness testified as follows:


Name and surname Antonina Piątkowska
Date of birth 24 December 1900
Parents’ names Cyprian and Helena, n ée Ziółkowska
Place of residence Kraków, Bema Street 2
Occupation employee in [illegible]
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Criminal record none
Relationship to the parties none
I arrived in the camp in Auschwitz on 27 May 1942 and stayed there until 18 January 1945. After

staying several months in the camp, in the autumn of 1942, Maria Mandl [from the] SS came to the camp. She served as the camp commandant, a so-called Oberaufseherin [senior overseer]. The accused SS woman Margot [Drechsel] was her deputy. They served these functions somewhere until mid-1944 – i.e. until the death sentence was passed in London on them and many other Germans. From that moment, the accused were transferred from the camp. The accused Mandl and Drechsel were known in the camp as the cruelest of the sadistic criminals.

As for the accused Mandl, the first of her criminal feats in the camp was to cause the deaths of several dozen sick women. This was at the end of July or at the beginning of August 1942, when the women prisoners were transferred from the men’s camp in Auschwitz to so-called Birkenau. The accused Mandl personally made the decision that any sick and weak women who we not able to walk would be taken by car. These women, without perceiving any deception, boarded several cars, which were sent on Mandl’s and Drechsel’s orders to the crematorium, where all the prisoners were gassed. The accused Mandl and Drechsel personally conducted selections for women to be executed. From 1942 these selections took place almost every day, during which several dozen people were sent to the gas. These selections were made by the accused largely on their own and at their own discretion.

The accused Mandl and Drechsel occasionally organized so-called delousings, which consisted in the prisoners being stripped naked in the cold and the snow and kept there for hours. After each delousing, the death toll in the camp rose as a result of the cold. While bathing in the bathhouse, on Mandl’s order, the SS men scorched the female prisoners with a hot iron, who then fainted when they became short of breath. In this way, in December 1942, Dr. Volentini died of burns.

The accused organized hunger punishments at the drop of a hat, during which we didn’t get any bread for two or three days. During those hunger punishments, she ordered us to pour out the soup that we were supposed to get. The accused Mandl and Drechsel felt a special hatred towards the Polish women. She called us: “You Polish pigs, you all came here to die out”.

The suspects often arranged night inspections, during which all the prisoners were thrown out of the blocks naked, and any food found in the block was destroyed and anything that was discovered was taken away.

In November 1943, after the departure of the German doctor Rohde, who forbade the accused from entering the area of the hospital, as revenge they arranged for the hospital to be deloused, during which about 50 percent of the patients died. The sick were ordered to walk to the baths, and those who couldn’t move were carried out on a stretcher, or washed on the spot with cold water on the orders of the accused.

In 1942, by the middle of this year, at the behest of the accused Mandl and Drechsel, pregnant women and newborns were taken to the hospital where, on the same day or after some time, they were killed with gasoline injections. Both the accused, without any reason, used to beat and kick the women prisoners.

Both were inseparable companions and acted together.

The report was read out.