Protocol of a witness hearing, recorded on 12 September 1945 in Darmstadt, based on the decree of the President of the Republic of Poland of 29 April 1940 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 9, item 23) and based on the authorisation provided on the basis of Art. 1 of the aforementioned decree.
Present:
Judge: Major Auditor [military judge with the rank of Major] W. Szuldrzyński Reporter: Sergeant J. Kulczycki
At the stand is witness Dr Wanda Szaynoka, who, upon being advised of the legal liability for false statements, states as follows:
| Name and surname | Wanda Szaynoka |
| Date and place of birth | 6 December 1898 in Rudenka, near Kiev |
| Names of parents | Ignacy and Adela née Rosołowska |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
| Education | Doctor of Medicine |
| Army rank | Home Army [AK] Captain |
| Citizenship | Polish |
| Place of residence in Poland | Warsaw |
| Current place of residence | AK military camp in Darmstadt |
| No impediments to testifying |
In legal form, under oath, [the witness] testifies:
During the September Campaign [of 1939], I was the medic and chief [aide to the commander] of a volunteer Lublin defence company. The company was under the command of Reserve Junior Lieutenant Ignatowski, whose second in command was Junior Lieutenant Stanisław Lenart. After the company was scattered, sometime around 14 September 1939, I headed to Chełm in Lublin voivodeship, and from there to Hrubieszów, where the remnants of the company laid down arms and disbanded.
On 20 October 1939, I returned to Warsaw and, with the exception of brief excursions on business matters, I remained there until the end of 1940.
In the first months, Warsaw was under military occupation, and, aside from arrests and deportations of officers, the civilian populace was not exposed to any major persecution. The situation changed in early 1940, when the Gestapo began to operate. This was made apparent already in spring, when Jews were stripped of all properties and businesses and resettled in the summer to special districts chosen for their habitation, which were walled off in the winter of 1940/41 to form a ghetto. As for the Polish populace, the first mass random arrests [łapanki] took place in April of 1940. People were arrested in Śródmieście, to be exact, near the Main Railway Station: in Aleje Jerozolimskie, on Towarowa Street, part of Marszałkowska Street and adjacent streets. The people caught by the Germans were gathered in a square near the Main Railway Station and were held in a barbed wire enclosure. There may have been 3,000 or 4,000 people in that square. Only those who could prove they had work were released, particularly doctors, and mothers with young children.
All around Warsaw people were saying that those people had been deported to Auschwitz. I could verify those rumours, as a friend of mine would show me letters she was receiving from her husband in Auschwitz. He was in that transport. Moreover, in February of 1942, a worker released from Auschwitz returned, and I treated him for tuberculosis. He had oedemas from starvation, which allowed the tuberculosis to develop very quickly, with a tendency to create cavities in the lungs. In spring of 1941, perhaps in May, as a result of the execution of Igo Sym by the AK, 300 hostages were arrested, including Karol Laskowski. An announcement was published, in the form of posters all over town, signed by SS- und Polizeiführer [SS and Police Commander] Moder, stating as follows: “As a result of the criminal murder of Igo Sym, 300 hostages have been taken, who will be shot in the case of any further sabotage. A curfew is instituted at 4 P.M., violating it may result in arrest or even death.”
Moreover, the announcement contained a warning that in the case of another sabotage action, the entire populace of Warsaw would be denied food rations. During my entire stay in Warsaw, the governor was Dr Fischer. In August of 1942, as a result of a railway sabotage action, including dismantling and blowing up railways, a significant number of Poles were arrested, and some 20 of them were publicly hanged in one of Warsaw’s suburbs, I believe it was in Ochota. Two of those hanged were priests. The entire autumn of 1942 was just a series of mass arrests. Young people of both sexes could only move around town if they were very careful. Anyone caught was taken to Skaryszewska Street and taken for forced labour in Germany. On 17 December 1942, I left for Kiev on official business. I was sent there to take advantage of my linguistic skills, but I was arrested by the Germans already on 13 January 1943. My arrest was brought about by a German non-commissioned officer named Jorgias, who pretended to be a Czech and so gained my trust – he spoke both Czech and Polish.
After a period in a prison in Kiev, I was moved to Lwów. In Kiev, I was interrogated by Hauptmann [Captain] Fischer from Hamburg, a Wehrmacht officer, and a Gestapo man whose name I do not know. In Lwów I was placed in the prison on Łąckiego Street, which was also a Gestapo post. The rest of the Gestapo offices were at Pełczyńska Street. All throughout this time I was in a solitary cell and never encountered any of the more important Germans. From Lwów I was transferred to Auschwitz, where I arrived on 3 October 1943.
I was placed in the women’s camp in Brzezinka – Birkenau in German. I do not recall the name of the Lagerkommandant [camp commandant], I only saw him once. The main person was the SS-Oberaufseherin [senior overseer] Mandel [Mandl]. She seemed about 26 or 28 years old, more or less, but she had to be older, as she had already been serving for some ten years. She was a golden blonde, with large, sapphire eyes, with very nice, pale pink skin, of more than average height (166 cm [5’5”]), very well built – a very handsome woman in general, and could drive a car very well. She was monstrous, she sicked dogs on prisoners, she would hit them with rubber truncheons and with her fists. Everyone knew she took great pleasure in executing prisoners. It was also said she would finish off prisoners with a revolver shot. She always carried a revolver and a rubber baton.
Mandl’s second in command was Drexler [Drechsel], also a member of the SS. She was around 38 years old, she had protruding front teeth in both jaws, typical rat teeth. She was a fanatic who never accepted a bribe. She beat people terribly with fists and a baton, sicked dogs on them and carried out the punishments prisoners were sentenced to. Unlike Mandl, who was always dressed in beautiful and luxurious clothing and had her hair done up, and took advantage of her position to enrich herself, Drechsel was rather unkempt.
The SS-Rapportführerin [SS-woman in charge of reports] was named Hasse. She would be best characterised by her own saying, known throughout the camp, namely, “An honest, self- respecting prisoner has an obligation to die within three months, those who live any longer are a thieving band of scavengers.” She was around 30 years old, tall, slender, with dark hair and eyes.
The punishments were usually handed out by Mandl. They included the following: the dark room in the bunker, lying or standing. The prisoner was usually put in the standing bunker for up to ten days, and in the lying bunker for an indeterminate time. Flogging, usually in public. Standing in knee-deep water. Stripping of food rations.
Birkenau was divided into lagers A, B, C, and D. Lager A consisted of 21 barracks. Lager B was a lot larger, it might have had some 30 barracks. C and D were beyond the rail line, they were large camps. Moreover, there was a hospital segment, consisting of 15 barracks. The crematoria, almost reached by the railway siding, were on the western side, north of camp B. I attach a sketch of the camp layout, and I stress that I was in the hospital segment, next to camp A, and thus I am more knowledgeable about camp A and the part of camp B that I would enter to reach the administration buildings, the shoe warehouse, the underwear warehouse, and the parcel storage. I would also go to a block in camp B for hygiene checks. Across the tracks were the Gypsy camps, a Jewish family camp, and others, with their separate hospital segments. I know that the evacuees from Warsaw were later moved to one of these in September of 1944. In the winter of 1943/44, camps A and B may have held some 20,000 women. I heard that the entire camp held some 60,000 women. I should explain here that according to a calculation based on the number of blocks and their population – every block had around 1,500 women – in camps A and B, I can say that just those camps housed 60,000 women.
I remained in Birkenau until 29 September 1944. In October, November, and December there were many transports from Russia, mostly from Minsk, Smolensk, Novgorod, and Orsha. I arrived on 3 October 1943 in a transport of around 500 women from Lwów, and was given the number 67,267. On 2 October, a transport from Lublin, Częstochowa, and Łódź arrived, also some 500 women strong. On 5 October, a transport from Warsaw’s Pawiak [prison] arrived, containing some 600 women. In late 1943, the camp numbers reached 80,000, and in April of 1944, it was at 90-some thousand. They were all women, mostly Aryans. At first, Jewish women would receive regular numbers, except that they had a triangle tattooed under the number. From February of 1944 onwards, they would have their own separate numbering, namely, the letter A and a number.
Mortality was greatest in November and December of 1943, as well as January of 1944, around 200-300 women a day. The causes of death were: typhus; typhoid fever; starvation diarrhoea; phlegmon, usually caused by untreated scabies; and a disease which we called “pemphigus” [pęcherzyca], completely unknown to me before the war. Its symptoms were larger and smaller blisters forming and merging on the bodies of the weakened, and bursting within less than twenty hours, leaving large swathes of skin without epidermis. The blisters spread so aggressively that within 48 hours we witnessed many cases where patients were missing epidermis on a third or even half of their body. Death usually came on the third or fourth day after the first blisters appeared. The disease was infectious, but only for those utterly exhausted, I never saw it spread to the personnel caring for the patients. I have heard of two cases of recovery from “pemphigus,” but I have not seen them myself.
In the hospital segment the blocks were built just like in the drawing I presented. They were narrow, long buildings with two entrances in the short walls. Not far from the entrances were stoves, connected by pipes, which looked from the outside like a brick bench – that was the entirety of the heating. The beds had three levels, and were placed just like in the drawing, by the long walls of the block. The worst one was the bed just next to the wall, as neither heating nor light would reach it, and the thin wooden wall let the cold in. It was so difficult to access that it was an art to drag a dead body out of such a bed. The sick coming to the hospital had to strip naked and were supposed to receive shirts, but by November of 1944 they no longer received the shirts and had to lie on the beds equipped only with a paper pallet filled with wood wool and two thin blankets, with no sheets. The block did not have plumbing or toilets, there were buckets by the beds, only covered with cardboard, they served to enable relieving oneself. There were no floors in the blocks, just beaten dirt riddled with holes dug by the innumerable rats. Camps A and B had blocks of the same type, some of which had floors, but that was still a rarity. Some blocks in camp A had four-level stone bunks: these were wider than the wooden beds. If every sleeping spot were only occupied by one person, a block would house some 170 women, but during the most intense periods of an epidemic, four women would sleep on one bed. In block 24, where I was a nurse, during the period of largest intensity there were 970 sick prisoners. Normally there were 250 to 350 patients in the block. When I was in the block, in the camp itself, some 1800 women slept there. The blocks were meant for 400 people at most, so with these numbers many women had to sleep sitting.
In these conditions, medical care could only leave a lot to be desired. It was performed by prisoner doctors overseen by the Lagerarzt [camp doctor] and Rewirarzt [segment doctor], Untersturmführer Dr König; in the spring of 1944, Obersturmführer Dr Mengele arrived as his superior. König did not stop prisoner doctors from working, he would just come for brief inspections, mostly making sure that buckets with filth were taken away. Doctor Mengele, on the other hand, was a psychopath, alcoholic, and most likely a cocaine addict; although he did not abuse the personnel physically, he was insanely bothersome for them because nobody knew what he was going to do. His eccentricities included bringing in a family of midgets from Hungary, whom he subjected to anthropological research, or dragging out twins and triplets from transports and subjecting them to meticulous care for the purposes of anthropological research. We had a lot of trouble with his pets, some of whom spied for him. German authorities provided us with the bare minimum of medicine and wound dressings. We would mostly get them from Polish secret organisations or from prisoners stealing them while unpacking seized prisoner property. Moreover, prisoners traded medications in the camp.
As for the camp’s day schedule, I find it difficult to present it, as few people in the camp had watches. The wakeup call came before sunrise every day. In the summer it may have been 3.30 A.M., in the winter 5 A.M. The roll call was taken right after wakeup and lasted until 7 or 8 A.M. – we had to wait around in the dark for hours. After the roll call, while still standing in lines, we would receive coffee or an herbal concoction they called “tea,” which was very harmful, as it had remarkably laxative qualities. After the roll call we had to wait in lines until it was light, or until the fog – which is frequent in Oświęcim – dissipated, then the kommandos [work details] left for work. That wait was very painful, as we were wearing almost nothing, and at work we would at least warm up. The work mostly involved constructing a siding and a road, digging ditches, in the summer we worked the fields, the experimental rubber growing station, and looking after rabbits and hens. The hardest work was with the road and siding construction, as there was very little in the way of draft animals and all the heavy items had to be carried by human power. There was a special band in Birkenau, made up of some 40 prisoners, which played marches when kommandos were leaving for work or coming back from it. The lunch was roughly between noon and 1 P.M., but kommandos working outside the camp did not come back for it. These kommandos had dinner brought to them. The dinner was a litre of soup, usually made from squash, dried nettles, and rutabaga. To this was added a powder called “Ovo” [“Awo”]. The powder was poured in personally by the Aufseherin. I made a great effort to obtain at least a little of the powder to research its contents, but to no avail. After an hour’s lunch break, work continued until dusk, then, after the kommandos returned, an evening roll call was held, lasting on average two hours. Dinner was handed out during the roll call, consisting of around 200 grams of bread and supplements. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Sundays we received 10 grams of sausage, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays around 15 to 20 grams of margarine, on Saturdays half a beer cheese – this was a white, rotten cheese. Sometimes a spoon of marmalade was added to the margarine.
The food was significantly improved in July of 1944. At that point we were fairly often issued pea soup, beans, sauerkraut, twice a week baked potatoes, honey, and marmalade. The kommandos went out to work led by a Kommandoführer, who was assisted by kapos and Anweisers as appropriate to the size of the kommando. The latter were prisoners, often even worse than the Kommandoführer. The pain of the work was largely dependent on the prisoners overseeing it. They were usually German, Jewish, or Russian, Poles were relatively few. But there was a rule that one could not rest even for a moment. A prisoner caught resting would be beaten and have dogs sicked on her. Cases of being shot at work were rare, and stopped entirely in spring of 1944. I remember that two Russians escaped in July of 1944 – after they were caught, they were just put on a penal kommando and did not receive any other punishment.
When I arrived in the Birkenau camp, it was common practice that every few weeks sick and weakened prisoners from the Jewish blocks 12 and 18, which were in the hospital segment, were picked out to be later gassed and burned in the crematorium. I watched those scenes when I started working in the hospital as a nurse. After dark, the Jewish blocks were surrounded by SS-men, then the prisoners were dragged outside by force, screaming horribly; they knew what was in store for them. They were taken to block 25, which was surrounded by a wall and barbed wire – the so-called death block – from which they were later transported to the gas chambers, and then to the crematorium. In my time Aryans did not endure similar treatment. This manner of killing sick Jewesses was repeated regularly until May of 1944.
On 16 May 1944, the first large Blocksperre [lockdown] was ordered in the camp. It meant that the kommandos returned from work early and nobody could leave their block on pain of death, of immediate shooting. As the hospital segment was close to the railway siding, I could make some observations. On that day, three Jewish transports arrived on the siding, every train consisting of around 60 cargo carriages. I counted the carriages several times and I always arrived at 50 to 60 carriages. The arriving Jews were ordered to unload their luggage, then they were lined up in fives and led towards the crematoria. I am convinced most of them were gassed, then burned, as from that night onward all of the crematoria smokestacks started blowing smoke almost constantly. From that day until about mid- August of 1944, two to five Jewish transports arrived every day and [the arrivals] were constantly being led to the crematoria. The packages offloaded between the tracks from the transports formed huge piles, occasionally as high as the carriages, even though they were removed every morning after the transports arrived. The next day, the track would be covered with packages again – they came from the transports arriving during the night. The people marching to be gassed were always followed by one German ambulance.
The prisoner count in the camp kept growing at a minimal rate in spite of these numerous transports. I talked with a French Jew once who told me, having no awareness of the situation, that she had no idea what happened to her travel companions, as she could not find them in the camp despite numerous attempts. She had arrived in a transport of some 3,000 people, from which [a group] of 200 was detached, including her. I calculate that between 16 May and mid-August some 300,000 Jews may have been gassed and burned in the Auschwitz crematorium. As the crematoria could not keep up with the burning of so many people, deep pits were dug near them. Wood was laid out on the bottom of them, then the bodies were laid out on the wood, then more wood was laid out, then bodies again and so forth, then after such preparations the pits were soaked in oil and set on fire. I was told this by people who had dug those pits. I have personally seen pine branches hauled behind a cart, and a huge glow emanating from that place in the night. The smell of burning bones and fat is so characteristic that when the wind blew in our direction I had no doubt that bodies were burning there. The pits burned for about four weeks, from mid-June to mid-July of 1944. One Sunday in the second half of June I saw baby carriages pushed from the crematorium to the Oświęcim railroad station. There were five carriages per line and the procession lasted over an hour, so I calculate there must have been several hundred of them, if not more. During the burning of the pits one could hear moans and screams coming from there, as well as gunshots and the barking of dogs. I heard that half-gassed people were thrown into the pits, and children were even thrown in there alive, and that it was they who screamed and moaned.
From mid-August of 1944, transports of people evacuated during the Warsaw Uprising started to arrive from the following [Warsaw] districts: Ochota; areas around Narutowicza Square; Towarowa Street, and adjacent streets; and in September there were numerous transports from Śródmieście. I figure that they brought in 12,000 women alone. The persons arriving in those transports were not tattooed and soon all younger, healthier ones were taken away to work in various factories. Older women and children were placed in camp C and I do not know what happened to them after Auschwitz was evacuated.
On 30 September 1944, I was taken to Ravensbrück, near Berlin, in a rail transport alongside some 1,500 women, mostly Poles, but also Russians and Yugoslavs. I was placed in a concentration camp for women. After two weeks of quarantine, I was employed as a doctor in the hospital segment. The Lagerarzt was Untersturmführer Percy Treite, whose mother was English. He was a decent man who liked Poles and gladly employed them. His downside was that he was a weak, cowardly man and allowed the hospital to be ruled by the SS-Oberschwester [SS senior nurse] whose name I never learned despite my efforts. She was 50-something, grey-haired, rotund, with a round face and green-blue eyes; she wore glasses for the far-sighted when reading.
Until mid-January, life in the camp was bearable – the housing and food were a lot better than in Auschwitz, the roll calls were only held in the morning, the work was more meaningful and lighter. The hygienic conditions and medical care were also better, there hospitals had bedsheets, linen for the patients, plumbing, toilets, and baths. The only problems concerned the fuel for the furnaces. After 15 January, Jewish transports from concentration camps by the factories started to arrive in the camp. [The persons] brought in were in the final stages of exhaustion and starvation. The camp was seized by an outbreak of starvation diarrhoea, as a result of which rather than two or three deaths a week we started to have 100-130 a day. The food became much worse and was reduced to three quarters of a litre of soup and a piece of bread a day.
During my stay no experimental surgeries were performed, I only saw scars on the legs of women who had been used for those experiments earlier. Five of those women were cripples, they could barely walk.
In February of 1945, a mass sterilization of Gypsy women began. Three doctors arrived from Berlin, their names were kept secret. They sterilized by injecting some sort of caustic liquid into the ovaries while looking at an X-ray. The procedure was so painful that girls were sedated for it. The Gypsies I saw three days after it were greyish green and complained of very strong pains. I do not know of any fatalities from these procedures. Girls from age 10 up were sterilized; the procedure was performed on some 400 women.
In late February, the so-called Jugendlager was opened for old and weak women selected from the healthy blocks. News spread that living conditions there were a lot better, that it was a so-called Schonungslager [recovery camp]. A hospital segment was organized there. A doctor, two nurses, and some supplies of medication and wound dressings were sent there. The women volunteered eagerly, hoping that they would no longer have to stand for roll calls and work. At the very end of February, the doctor and the nurse were recalled, and at the same time Hauptsturmführer [SS captain] Dr Winkelmann arrived in the camp. As a doctor, he took over all the blocks where the most severely or incurably sick patients resided. He started making selections from among the sick, which Dr Treite had refused to do, as had Obersturmführer [SS lieutenant] Dr Lukas [Lucas], who had come from Auschwitz and was sent to the front for this refusal. The selection consisted of Dr Winkelmann taking a look at every patient standing or lying down, with her medical history in hand, then passing the histories to the SS-Schwester [SS nurse] assisting with the visit. After the review, the SS-Schwester would write down the names and numbers of those selected, and then the list went to the record office, where lists for specific blocks were made.
On 4 March 1945, the first transport of patients for the Jugendlager took place. The sick were dragged out of bed amid the screams, curses, and insults of the SS-men and Aufseherins and loaded onto trucks. During that first selection, more than a dozen German women were taken away from my block. The second batch of deportations took place on 25 March 1945. The selection was far more careful this time, as a few days after the first one an order had come to write down nationalities on the medical history records, and the Germans were removed. In any case, during that selection, over 300 people were taken away from the entire hospital, while the first one took over 600. The third and final deportation took place on 31 March 1945, it included some 150 persons from the entire hospital. Aside from the selections in the sick blocks, there were also selections among the healthy, in blocks inhabited by prisoners without a permanent employment. The selections were conducted by Dr Winkelmann, assisted by Arbeitsführer Pflaum. During selections all women had to march in front of him barefoot and any with swollen legs or grey hair, or very emaciated, were set aside and taken away to the Jugendlager. In March of 1945, over 4,000 women died in the Jugendlager.
On 2 April, the dismantling of the Ravensbrück crematorium began, and on 4 April 1945 some 500 persons still remaining from the Jugendlager were brought back to the camp. Of those, 101 persons were immediately taken to my block, where I was a doctor, as patients. These women were in a desperate state, emaciated, starving, and seemingly half insane. Most of them, particularly those brought in on a stretcher, were afraid to state their names and assured they were healthy and would get up any moment now. They panicked at the thought of being transferred to the so-called Tagesraum [common room]. Only after they were laid in beds and fed in the evening did they agree to go to the Tagesraum. I stress here that before the sick arrived, the Oberschwester called the doctors and ordered them to provide special care for those prisoners, and sent an extra dietary soup for them.
Most of the patients did not want to speak about the living conditions in the Jugenslager. The patients moved to the Tagesraum spoke in hushed tones that they were scared of that room because the sick were taken there and given poison pills or lethal injections. These procedures were carried out by the SS-Schwesters, namely, Schwester Martha and Schwester Brigitte, the latter having arrived in Ravensbrück from Poznań. Schwester Brigitte should be in the British occupation zone, as she was sent to some camp near Hamburg. The crematorium in Ravensbrück worked day and night in the period when women were taken to the Jugendslager, moreover, I was told that corpses from the Jugendslager were taken to Oranienburg and Fürstenberg.
Hauptsturmführer Dr Winkelmann, around 57 years old, was tall (186 cm ), brawny, broad- shouldered, he had a wide face with sagging cheeks, small, hazel eyes, dark hair, crew cut. He seemed like a good-natured old man, he had a potato-like nose and hanging lower lip.
Arbeitsführer Pflaum, around 40 years old, no higher than 160 cm, small, rotund, with a large belly, dark blonde, with small, grey eyes and the red face of a drunk. He abused the prisoners, beat them with a baton, kicked them until the victims lost consciousness.
Schwester Brigitte, around 34-35 years old, 174 cm, rotund, well-built, with prominent bust, dark blonde, whitish pink face, white, healthy teeth, pleasant smile. A handsome woman in general, slender, with impressive stature, attracting attention.
Schwester Martha was such an average type that without the last name no description can help.
On 9 April, I left under the watch of the Aufseherin to the Nehltheuer [Mehltheuer] concentration camp near Plauen, part of the Flossenbürg camp group, where on 16 April I was liberated by the American forces.
The protocol was read before signing.
Concluded.