| Name and surname | Dr. Janina Kowalczyk |
| Age | 40 |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Marital status | married |
| Occupation | medical doctor, docent at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków |
| Relationship to the party | none |
| Presiding Judge: | I am advising the witness in accordance with art. 107 of the Code of |
Criminal Procedure of the obligation to speak the truth. Making false declarations is punishable by conviction with a maximum penalty of 5-year imprisonment. Do the parties wish to swear in the witness?
Prosecution: We are exempting the witness from taking the oath.
Defense: As are we.
I was interned at the Auschwitz concentration camp between January and August 1943. During that period, I came across the defendants on the camp grounds. After being brought to Auschwitz, I was initially, similarly to any prisoner who was at the camp at that time, at the women’s camp in Birkenau in block 14, later I worked as a doctor at block 24, also at this camp, and after that I was moved to the men’s camp, where I worked at block 10. Later, I was moved from block 10 to Rajsko, where I had remained for the final six weeks of my time at the camp, i.e. until August 1943.
After being brought to the camp, I was initially an ordinary prisoner, then I worked as a so called Stubendienst, that is prisoner on duty, at block 14, and for that reason I can describe and characterize the women’s camp in Birkenau at that time. Female prisoners were all housed in several barracks, alternatively in brick-built buildings, which were located in slimy, muddy, stony fields. These living blocks were only partly brick-built, with no floors, covered with a roof, and inside there were two rows of elevated bricked surface with bunks, on which the women slept, lying on boards, or alternatively, but rarely, on a bed tick filled with cuttings.
These so-called bunks were narrow, and at that time at block 11, each one accommodated, on average, seven to nine women, and in such a way that a prisoner wanting to shift her position at night could only turn on her side. There was no floor, just firm ground, the roof was leaky, and there was no light, so it was complete darkness.
The hygiene conditions were below any acceptable level. There were no proper toilets – only behind the barracks, at the far end of the camp was a pit where you were allowed to go only during the day.
As regards the nutrition of the prisoners, it turned out that when doctors experimented on animals outside the camp, these animals, living on such a prison diet, even when their food quotas were not limited, developed hunger disease. The prisoner’s alimentation included a soup, with no nutrients, and some bread with a little cheese. Female prisoners developed diseases on a mass scale, which were partly related to infections and partly to this kind of nutrition. The clothes of female prisoners (when I came to the camp it was winter) were only dungarees and it was impossible to wear anything warmer. The same applied to camp shoes. Female prisoners always wore the same thing regardless of whether they worked indoors or outdoors. When they worked outdoors, they could not even dry their clothes if they were soaked.
After a short period, I was moved from this general camp to the hospital section, where I was assigned to block 24. Initially, it housed female patients suffering from various diseases, and later only those with diarrhea. Only severely sick people were admitted to the hospital. A large number of the sick would not be admitted and died at the camp.
At the hospital, female prisoners mostly suffered – as regards contagious diseases – from spotted typhus and dysentery, as well as diarrhea caused by inadequate nutrition. This was a type of hunger disease. Other than myself, there were German Jewess doctors and one Czech doctor. One lost her mind and was exterminated as a result, and the others died of typhus.
At the camp the sick had no bedsheets, no beds and no proper food or medication, and even so we were required to treat people and keep the records of the disease and treatment. This led to many frictions between prisoner-doctors and German doctors. I was involved in one such conflict with Dr. Tite, who criticized me for not recording the treatment method, while treatment was in most cases impossible since I had at my disposal only a minimal amount of medicine smuggled in by men coming to the women’s camp for labor or from other illegal channels.
The sick lay on three-storied bunks, two or three of them on one plank, with no sheets, very often naked. They were – especially those suffering from diarrhea – extremely emaciated, with symptoms characteristic of those with severely weakened mental and physical functions. They were people who at the camp were referred to as “Muslims”, which denoted a patient or prisoner who, following neural changes, sat, curled up, covered with a rag or blanket and always shivered from the cold. These patients, as a result of starvation, had delayed reactions to questions and commands, and since they very often obeyed orders in a considerably delayed manner, this made the German crew livid. The sick were so feeble that sometimes at night rats not only nibbled at the legs of the corpses, which, by the way, we moved outside the barrack, but also of women still alive, who would survive for a day or two longer. Often, these women had their legs bitten to the bone. I had the opportunity to tend to the legs of one such person. Her feet looked like that of a skeleton. She lived for two more days. Doctors working at the women’s camp were then in a very difficult position. We simply had to lie to these patients that we were giving them some medication that would bring them relief so as to keep their spirits up somehow.
Those patients, dying of disease and out of starvation, were nourished just like other prisoners, or even worse, since they were not eligible for extra portions given to working prisoners. The mortality rate in this part of the hospital in the camp was huge. Sometimes, at night, out of a barrack which housed 200, 300 or 400 patients we would remove a dozen or so bodies outside so that the special unit, the so-called corpse unit, could pick them up and take them to block 15, to the yard, from where these corpses were taken to the crematorium.
At that time, just before moving to the hospital, I was present at a so-called general roll call. Auschwitz prisoners died in two ways: they were either sentenced to death, or picked up during a so-called selection, which meant that from among those still alive a German panel selected those who were weak and sentenced them to death. It was a deliberate approach (also the sick died in the course of this deliberate approach, though less direct, i.e. of hunger disease). At the beginning of February, I participated in one such general roll call.
It was freezing that day. At 5.00 a.m., all women from the women’s camp were driven to the fields in front of the camp and we were then surrounded by SS men with rifles – and this is where we remained, on slightly elevated ground, so we could see very well what was going on at the women’s camp until late afternoon, that is until later than 12.00 p.m. In the meantime, the whole camp was thoroughly searched for items that prisoners may have stashed and a detailed personal inspection was carried out, during which they checked if we had not hidden food (this was a period when we had started to receive parcels), and when we were rushed for the general roll call outside the camp, we had those scraps of food that we had saved taken away from us.
After the camp was searched, corpses were ferried out of block 25 in vans, and the last van, aside from the corpses, carried women who were still alive and stretched their arms forward, shouting in our direction. The dead and the living were taken to Birkenau, to the crematorium.
After the search of the camp was concluded, we were told to form groups of five, and then, by the camp gate, scurry past the panel comprising representatives of SS and camp authorities, who were watching. The younger and stronger of the female prisoners ran. In front of me ran a French woman, or at least she tried to run; she was brought to Auschwitz after some trial of communists in Paris, together with another French woman. This woman had one leg and she supported herself on a crutch. We noticed that she was pushed to the other side of the road straight away. Those of the women who were stronger and could run were let inside the camp. Those who weakened, or whose face they did not like, or who, like the French woman, limped, or – like a lady from Kielce, whose name I do not know – could not run, were immediately pushed off the Lagerstrasse, i.e. the camp’s main road. All the women who had been selected filled block 25, emptied during the general roll call, anew, only to be ferried off to the Birkenau crematorium after a few days.
Let me add, to further characterize the women’s camp at that time, that the composition was very varied. There were women of various nationalities. Aside from Poles, there were Germans, mostly criminal offenders and a few communists, there were Czechs from a big trial of communists, brought on the same day I arrived, there were women from France, Yugoslavia, Holland, Belgium, representatives of almost all nations.
Aside from this linguistic diversity, the chaos among the female prisoners was all the greater because these persons were from very different backgrounds. Some women were prisoners from political trials, and others – mostly from Poland – were women arrested during street round-ups, during the so-called special operation in the General Government. At that time, peasant women with children displaced from the Zamość region were brought in. I remember two 14-year-old girls from the Zamość region, twins, who were placed in block 13: one of them was bitten by an Aufseherin’s [overseer] dog. We were watched by female guards, who always moved with big dogs, and one of these twins was bitten by one such dog. Aside from these women, political and criminal offenders, and a significant number of Jewesses, there were also women brought from Fordon prison, sentenced to imprisonment of more than three years. This linguistic diversity, the very different backgrounds from which the prisoners came, made for some very special living conditions at the camp, an issue I will try to pick up later.
After some time in block 24, where I worked as a general practitioner, I was, because of my specialization (anatomical pathology) moved to the men’s camp, where I was placed in barrack 10. Block 10, so-called block 10F, was located on the grounds of the men’s camp. Around 200 women were kept in this block.
Additionally, block 10 housed the Hygiene-Institut [der] Waffen-SS – Südost. This institute performed serology and bacterial tests for the camp and for a number of other hospitals. It also had a dentist’s and dental technology laboratory. I was supposed to work at the institute under Dr. Weber as a histopathologist, but that was only part of the duties at block 10. Those sent to block 10 were women straight from transports, straight from outside the camp, having been picked by German doctors or orderlies, whom I did not know, at train stations. Then, these women were sent to block 10, where they were to become guinea pigs – they were to be the subject of experiments by German doctors. During my time there, the following German doctors worked there: Dr. Weber, Dr. Clauberg, Dr. Schumann, Dr. Wirths. My immediate superior was Dr. Weber.
As much as was possible, we tried, while staying at the camp, to find out about the method and purpose of the experiments conducted on these women, which was not easy, because the German doctors tried to keep these experiments secret and they knew it was not the best idea to discuss them.
The experiments were conducted in three directions. Some women were sent, on foot, from Auschwitz block 10 to Birkenau, where they were exposed to X-rays, and underwent a surgical procedure after a while. Female prisoners had their ovaries cut out, which then underwent histological examination. Some ovaries were sent for examination to Hamburg.
Other experiments, conducted by Dr. Clauberg, were connected with rendering women infertile. This was done by means of injecting some liquid, supposed to cause infertility, into the uterus.
The third type of experiment was to do with removing part of the vagina and uterus and performing follow-up histological tests. Part of this histologic material was passed to me for examination to see if it did not display the initial stages of cancer. The female prisoners were told they should be glad because they had had the initial stage of cancer operated.
Let me mention that it was mostly Jewesses that were selected for these experiments and that they would take a mother and her daughter. I know of a case whereby the mother was 40, and the daughter was 17, and they underwent such surgery.
Additionally, some histological tests were performed, without clear purpose, and also some anthropological tests – and it was never clear what their aim was. They also raided women’s rooms and selected several of them – young and old, plump and thin – to, as they put it, examine the structure and shape of their noses. Also some urological examinations were performed.
If they wanted to transport women to Birkenau, then these women would rather save some extra few weeks of life or be mutilated, because they knew that certain death awaited them at Birkenau.
Presiding Judge: Were experiments on children also conducted as part of these examinations?
Witness: Not during these period. Typically, there were no children at the camp. At block 10, there were three children, brought together with their mothers. There were no children at Birkenau, except for infants who were born there. They were exterminated right after birth with a phenol injection, or lay uncovered and unattended to for long hours, and then died.
Newborn babies could only survive for a few weeks, because the mothers, worn down by the camp conditions, were not able to feed them. During my time at this ward, a few babies were born, but they all died soon afterward. One doctor, Dr. Rohde, even brought some milk for a Gypsy baby, but this milk arrived too late, and the baby died anyway.
Only at the Gypsy camp were there children. Just like other prisoners, they developed diseases resulting from severe nutritional abnormalities, but mostly they developed noma, a condition whereby the tongue, cheeks, and lips developed so-called gangrene, i.e. they necrosed and came off. The Germans carried out extensive examinations to detect the cause of this noma. This disease probably occurred also following infections by certain strains of bacteria in malnourished children.
Presiding Judge: You say that there were children at the camp. Could children be born at the camp?
Witness: When I was at the Auschwitz camp, it was not possible to record the birth of a child. During the first week of my internment, a woman from the Zamość region gave birth at block 14. Nurses came to her and took the baby. When I inquired about it, they said that the baby would be exterminated. At the beginning of April, the stance somewhat slackened. Children could live in the same conditions as adults. No special care was permitted. Consequently, the children who had been spared died after some time. The situation improved when the children at the so-called quarantine block could live for a particular period, but also with no specialist care. Giving birth during the initial spell at the camp, especially prior to my arrival, and reporting it to the camp authorities meant a death sentence both for the child and the mother. That is why miscarriage was often recorded in logs.
Presiding Judge: Do you know of cases of a death sentence given to the mother and the child?
Witness: I know of such cases, because I was interested in them, being pregnant myself.
Presiding Judge: Were mothers forced to kill their own children?
Witness: I do not know that, but I know of a case whereby during a transport to the crematorium a mother denied that a baby was hers and it died together with the grandmother, while the mother went to the camp: she wanted to survive the camp because her husband was also there.
Presiding Judge: Can you tell us anything specific as regards the defendants, especially the women?
Witness: Nothing specific. I was a prisoner like everybody else, and like everybody else I avoided the camp authorities.
Presiding Judge: Did you come across defendant Mandl? How did she treat prisoners?
Witness: I know that when she appeared at a block, panic ensued among the prisoners. I never had any direct contact with her. The camp authorities were reluctant to come to hospitals, fearing epidemic.
Presiding Judge: Why did panic ensue?
Witness: Because inspections would then start, for concealing food, for violating camp rules, that is for being in possession of a warm sweater, for an improperly worn scarf, etc.
Presiding Judge: So the conduct of defendant Mandl was generally acceptable?
Witness: I did not have any contacts with her personally, but other female prisoners dreaded her terribly.
Presiding Judge: So did they complain about her?
Witness: Yes, they said that she pulled them by their scarves or by their hair – as long as the prisoner had some, because after the prisoner arrived at the camp, her hair was cut and would grow back only later.
Presiding Judge: Did the hospital admit as patients prisoners who had been beaten by Mandl?
Witness: I do not know of such cases.
Presiding Judge: Did you come across the other female defendants?
Witness: I do not recall these defendants.
Presiding Judge: Do you recall coming across the female defendants present in this room and recall the names of Mandl, Brandl, Alice Orlowski, Luise Danz, and Hildegard Lächert?
Witness: The name Brandl is known to me, but I cannot put a face to it. But I know the name from the camp.
Presiding Judge: In what context did you hear about defendant Brandl? Positive or negative?
Witness: I cannot associate this name with any particular facts.
Presiding Judge: Did you come across the accused doctors present in the room? (the presiding judge orders the accused doctors to stand up).
Witness: I did not come across them.
Presiding Judge: Are there any questions?
Prosecutor Szewczyk: You have testified about the grossly inadequate alimentation of female prisoners, which consisted of small amounts of lean soup, little bread and a small amount of cheese or sausage. Please specify these rations in more detail, especially given the fact that as a doctor you can provide a professional assessment of the extent to which these rations were insufficient, or alternatively the limited extent to which they would satisfy the needs of a working person.
Witness: In the morning, female prisoners received black coffee and a piece of bread, most often to suffice for the entire day. This bread, aside from flour, consisted mostly of scraps. In any case, after the bread was examined at a German institute, we were informed that it was deemed inadequate for ingestion by humans. On top of that, we only received very small amounts of this bread. At noon, a soup was served, which should theoretically contain meat, and which usually had a few scraps floating on the surface in the caldron. Other than that, the soup contained cooked Swedish turnip or was cooked on green leaves, seasoned with a special mixture for camp soups, which had a foul, nauseating taste which took some time to get used to. Sometimes, potatoes, cooked in skin, were added. We typically brought these potatoes ourselves from the kitchen, in blankets, and threw them into the soup. A sizeable portion of them were rotten. In the evening, we received tea on leaves or black coffee; there was no bread if we had already had some in the morning, but there was a so-called addition: namely, 700 or 800 people coming through the door opened their palms and had a spoonful of marmalade thrown on them. From time to time, at different periods, female prisoners, especially those who worked, received an addition in the form of kwargiel [salty curd cheese with caraway seed] or a slice of sausage.
Working manually, they often traded this kwargiel or sausage for a bowl of soup, because although the portions were bigger, it was not enough calorie-wise. After a few weeks at the camp, unless a female prisoner got help from fellow prisoners, she developed starvation diarrhea.
We, i.e. doctors at the camp, did not at that time fully realize what camp diarrhea was, because such diarrheas do not occur in normal circumstances. We only later found out that these diarrheas result from starvation. It turns out that if you starve experimental animals, giving them the same food which prisoners at concentration camp received, even in larger amounts than we were getting, but of the same quality, these animals cannot but develop hunger disease.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: Did camp doctors responsible for prisoners’ nutrition or the Schutzhaftlagerführer, who under the regulations was also responsible for the camp, take any steps to prevent this misery, to stop this overflow of diarrhea, and to improve nutrition?
Witness: I know that they knew about it.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: And what did they do to counter it?
Witness: One has to be aware of the relation of the prisoner to the superior. You would have been risking your life asking the doctor if he had taken any steps. If any of us had asked about it, that may have resulted in a death sentence for such a bold person. On the other hand, there were no results, and they would not tell us what they were doing to help. Once, Dr. Kitt came to the women’s camp, where 30 persons looking like skeletons were sitting on a bench. Dr. Kitt came in and he asked, “What is this?” I said, “Lice”, and he asked, “What do you mean, lice?” I showed him their backs, riddled with lice. He then asked which block this was – he wanted to hand out punishment. I told him that every block looked like this. Then, I was told that as a result of this behavior, the best-case scenario for me was the Strafkompanie [penal company]. For several hours I had to wait to find out how I would be punished for this “impudence”. I learned that Dr. Kitt had gone to the emergency room and ordered that he be sprayed with a disinfecting agent, because he had looked at these lice.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: So this was it as regards reacting to lice infestation?
Witness: Yes. After a while, I observed that if a patient suffering from diarrhea received parcels from home the diarrhea subsided; if she received cheese or sausage – slowly, gradually – hunger diarrhea also let up.
We were told to enter into the medical records the names of medications administered in treatment, but no medications were administered. During one selection, Dr. Kitt ordered female prisoners to be selected for block 25, which he called the Schonungsblock [recovery block]. I thought that really this was a block where they would not be overstrained; I only later found out that when they left it was only to meet their death. When Dr. Kitt would come and select people for block 25, questions were asked about why the medical records were not updated, and why the names of the medications administered were not entered. Then I was told that the sick were not receiving any medication. In any case, they doubtless knew that the camp was infested with lice, that there were no medications and that hunger reigned at the camp.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: But despite this knowledge, the actual level of prisoners’ alimentation did not change?
Witness: No, it did not.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: As regards children: at the beginning of your testimony, you said that a group of women and children was brought in from the Zamość region. What was the number of these children?
Witness: They were girls, who could be classified as young adults. The two I mentioned were 14-year-old girls.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: As regards the experiments, you mentioned four names: Clauberg, Schumann, Wirths and Weber. We have listened about the experiments of Clauberg and Schumann. Could we find out something about the experiments of Wirths and Weber?
Witness: I cannot tell you anything about Wirths’s experiments because he was on leave at that time. I did not work with the sick on whom the experiments had been performed, nor was I present during these experiments. I do not know when and how they were conducted. I know that Schumann and Weber were interested in women, who were exposed to radiation to render them infertile. Dr. Clauberg conducted experiments with fallopian tubes, but I know nothing about Dr. Wirths’s experiments. Knowing that I was a doctor, they tried to keep me in the dark as much as possible in that respect. There was a French doctor, Doval, who was a psychiatrist and neurologist. She was assigned to block 10. For many weeks, although she was with the patients, she did not know what operations were performed on them. Already after I left block 10, she had strong enough courage of her convictions to tell Dr. Wirths that she would not take part in experiments on people. Dr. Wirths did not do what we had anticipated, i.e. sentence her to death. Instead, he sent her to Birkenau, where he knew she would perish sooner or later.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: Did the women on whom experiments were performed at block 10 give their consent to it?
Witness: No, never.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: How should we consider such experiments from the point of view of medical ethics?
Witness: There were young girls there, Jewesses from Greece, who had reached a relatively low level of mental development, befuddled by what was going on around them. They did not realize it. But I know of cases in which Belgians, who were intelligent women, working with Dr. Clauberg as nurses, literally begged at his feet so that he would not conduct these experiments on them and not render them infertile, but to no avail.
Some women did not know about the experiments or they were conducted against their will, and some were lied to that they were in danger of cancer. From the point of view of medical ethics, doctors on certain occasions need to conduct experiments, when they have to test a drug’s effects on severely, terminally ill people, but with their knowledge, consent, and to their benefit, and also if requested. But these experiments were conducted for two reasons: they were consistent with the German strategy and, undoubtedly, they were to facilitate the extermination of the conquered nations by rendering them infertile.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: I have one more question. You talked about the patients suffering from spotted typhus and diarrhea; were there also other diseases, such as pemphigus, tuberculosis, etc.?
Witness: There was a number of contagious diseases: spotted typhus, dysentery, and also abdominal typhus was a possibility in certain cases. Also, erysipelas and so-called pemphigus were not contagious; rather, they occurred when female prisoners were starved during insolation. As regards TB, female prisoners arrived at the camp at the early stages of the disease, which then developed. Also, due to emaciation, purulence, phlegmon, and secondary infections were widespread.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: Please tell us who carried out selections: overseers or camp doctors?
Witness: This was at the beginning of my time at the camp, when I did not know these camp authorities yet. There were some women in dark capes, who ran around the camp with dogs. Female prisoners ran across what was called “the bridge of death”.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: One more question.
Presiding Judge: I am ordering a break of ten minutes.
(Continued after the break).
Prosecutor Szewczyk: Did reports record the cause of death of people who had been gassed?
Witness: The records pertaining to gassings were kept at the so-called emergency room. Personally, I had nothing to do with these entries. Once, I was asked to write a paper entitled “The medical history of a person who died of pneumonia”, but I was not told what the purpose was. I suspect that this template was to be used in the cases of exterminated prisoners. Usually, doctors gave fake diagnoses. Spotted typhus meant that the afflicted person would inevitably die.
Prosecutor Pęchalski: In the context of a mother’s life being in danger, were there cases whereby mothers drowned their children after giving birth?
Witness: I know of such a case, at block 24. When a mother, who knew that reporting a birth meant a death sentence both for the mother and the child, caught between hell and high water, decided to drown her own child.
Defense attorney: Doctor, do you know Dr. Mansfeld from Budapest, director of the Hygiene Institute?
Witness: I do.
Presiding Judge: Show this document to the witness, please.
(The document was shown to the witness).
Witness: It reads that Dr. Mansfeld provides my name, saying that, when in Kraków, he spoke to me about Dr. Münch, and that I would be able to provide detailed information concerning Dr. Münch. Definitely, this issue may have been raised in our conversation, but I do not remember this exactly. In any case, he did not work between January and August 1943 at the women’s camp, nor at block 10, nor at Rajsko, nor at the men’s ward where I worked.
Presiding Judge: Are there any more questions for the witness?
Defendant Aumeier: May I ask a question?
Presiding Judge: Please.
Defendant Aumeier: I would like the witness to say how much time she spent at block 10.
Witness: Between 1 May 1943 and 1 August 1943, give or take, because we did not have a calendar.
Defendant Aumeier: Did you ever see me at block 10?
Witness: I did not.
Presiding Judge: Are there any more questions? Then the witness is dismissed and I am adjourning the proceedings until 9.00 a.m. tomorrow.