On 17 September 1947 in Kraków, a member of the Kraków District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Magistrate Dr Henryk Gawacki, on the written application of the First Prosecutor of the Supreme National Tribunal dated 25 April 1947 (file no. NTN 719/47), in accordance with the provisions of and procedure provided for under the Decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 51, item 293), in conjunction with article 254, 107, 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, heard as a witness the below mentioned former prisoner of the Auschwitz concentration camp, who testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Mieczysław Kieta |
| Age | 28 |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Occupation | journalist |
| Place of residence | Kraków, Skawińska Boczna Street 12/11 |
| The witness testifies without hindrance. |
As a political prisoner, I was imprisoned in the Auschwitz camp on 17 August 1942 and after receiving no. 59590 I stayed there until 13 November 1944, after which I was transferred to the Gross-Rosen camp and then, in February 1945, to the Litomierzyce camp.
In Auschwitz, until the last days of August 1942, I worked on the regulation of the river Soła, then I was employed to clean up and organize block 10 in the parent camp, then more or less until mid-October 1942 I worked in the Wasserversorgung [water supply] work team. Then, for a short time I came down with typhus, and after recovering I was employed initially as an errand boy in block 20, and then as a nurse. In connection with my work in block 20, which housed the prisoners’ hospital, I came down with various infectious diseases. From the end of February 1943 to the end of my stay in the Auschwitz camp, I was employed at the Institute of Hygiene in Rajsko, initially as a lab technician, and then as a warehouseman in a chemical and apparatus warehouse.
In August 1942, on the 29th, I came across Lagerführer [head of the camp] Aumeier. On this day after the evening roll call, Aumeier, accompanied by a Rapportführer whose name I don’t know and several SS men of various ranks, carried out a large-scale selection of prisoners, even healthy ones but whose legs were either swollen or slightly wounded. A few hundred people were set aside and, as I later learned from some other prisoners, all of them were brought to Birkenau for gassing. Among them, my father, arrested alongside myself in Kraków, also died. I saw Aumeier from quite a distance, in the darkness, in the light of hand-held reflectors – the selection lasted from dusk until around 1.00 a.m. I saw Aumeier make a thorough review of the individual working teams lined up in the square in front of the kitchen.
One day in September 1942, in connection with the general clean-up of the camp, Aumeier delivered a speech to the prisoners, in which he stressed that the camp authorities don’t want the prisoners to die, but that they need the prisoners alive in order to work.
In January 1943, the Effektenkammer and Bekleidungskammer [warehouses] kommandos were liquidated, and therefore I saw Aumeier, Grabner, Palitzsch and others walking around and shouting at those prisoners gathered and isolated at block 24. Some of the prisoners were shot and some were sent to the punitive unit.
In September 1942, Aumeier sentenced me and two other prisoners to 25 lashes for the fact that the roll call from block 10 had a discrepancy – one of the prisoners, who was ill, was hiding under the bed and didn’t make it out for the roll call.
When I was working on block 10, which was adjacent to block 11, a block leader, a guy from Warsaw whom I didn’t really know, told me that if I heard any shouts from the courtyard between blocks 10 and 11, I should stop arranging the halls of that half of the block that was adjacent to that courtyard, and go to some other rooms instead. At that time, I didn’t know yet that some “shoot-outs” were taking place in this yard. Once I heard some shouts in Czech and Polish. Intrigued, I peeked through the wooden shutters and through a crack I saw a prisoner crawling at Aumeier’s feet as if he was begging for something; Aumeier gave him a kick, and finally, having pulled out his pistol, he shot him twice. Whether the prisoner lying on the ground died, I don’t know.
At the turn of September and October 1942, I was staying in block 17 in the parent camp, where the Blockführer was Kurt Müller, whom I recognize well in the photograph shown to me. Müller beat and kicked prisoners and often abused them by hitting a prisoner in the stomach with the edge of the block leader’s wooden board. All the prisoners were afraid of him.
At this the report was concluded, read out and signed.