On 11 March 1947 in Dzierżoniów, the Municipal Court in Chełm in the person of Judge S. Antonowicz, heard the person named below as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the provisions of Article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and of the significance of the oath, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Michał Denkiewicz |
| Age | 53 |
| Parents’ names | Anna, Stanisław |
| Place of residence | Chełm, Lubelska Street 123 |
| Occupation | merchant |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
While we were getting off in Auschwitz, they told us to jump out of the wagon straight into a gully, and those who didn’t jump right away were hit with a baton by the Gestapo. We were taken to the registry block, next to which men’s naked corpses were being loaded onto a cart. Each of us received a registry card which had the personal data of a deceased person on the other side. We were stripped of clothes and food and they led us to the baths naked, with numbers, where all our hair was shaved off. After a wash, we got dressed in striped prison uniforms and clogs.
I was placed in [block] 11 –the “death block”, from where you could see the “black wall”, two gallows and a pool with sand for the shot convicts. We encountered prisoner “Staszek” from Zamość with a thick baton, who beat and killed inmates with it. He was a short man with dark hair, 23 years old. He was the one to lead people to the wall for the executions. We were put in dirty beds full of lice and fleas, three on each bed.
Engineer Robak took us to work as carpenters. They dressed us in fresh clothes and moved us to block 15. We walked to work in an arms factory. I worked there until the time of the evacuation in 1944. They were harassing the prisoners during work. A Gestapo man – 50 years old, above-average height, blonde, and kapo Robak from Gdańsk – a furniture engineer – beat prisoners to death. The deputy of the former was kapo Bytomski, a teacher from Poland, formerly the principal of a vocational school, who beat the prisoners with whatever weapon he could find. Clerk Komkiewicz from Poznań, a merchant in the fabric industry, snitched on prisoners to the Gestapo, who tortured them as a result.
At dinners and roll calls, Gestapo men whose names are unknown to me would beat and kill the prisoners near the worksite entrance, on the stairs. Gestapo men beat the inmates with steel horsewhips covered in rubber. I received a blow like this on the fingers in my right hand and as a result my little finger is broken and bones in three other fingers are fractured. I saw how such a knock on the head cracked a prisoner’s skin and skull and splashed his brains. A principal of a primary school in Auschwitz was beating up and killing prisoners on the square. I don’t recall his name and surname. He was a man of medium height, dark blonde, 33 years old with an oval face. Germans were killing people in block 11 by injections. Two prisoners would hold a blanket while the injection was made by a prisoner doctor, and the victim would die instantly, falling down on the blanket.
They didn’t execute with firearms, but with needles from an automatic rifle. The shot couldn’t be heard. He shot them in the back of the head, in the occipital bone.
On 28 October 1942, they called out prisoners from Lubelszczyzna, shooting many of them. The execution carried on until 30 October 1942, and during those three days they shot 286 men from Lubelszczyzna. The rest remained alive thanks to the operation’s withdrawal.
They kept shooting the junior prisoners, numbers 60,000 and above. The SS men carried out the executions. They showed the bodies to the inmates, saying they had been killed for attempted escape. They organized public executions by hanging. On this occasion, the camp’s commandant, a short, blonde German man, 32-33 years old, said that a prisoner in Auschwitz could only live up to six months, and if they lived longer, they were doing this at the expense of their colleagues and the camp, and thus stealing from [them].
Prisoners put the noose [around the victims’ necks] by the Gestapo’s order, who pressed the springs and caused the platform to collapse.
I saw an elderly man and a woman and a young 18-year-old miss standing by a post with an inscription behind them: “These are the parents and fiancée of a prisoner who has escaped. If he doesn’t return by the given time, they will be hanged”. The mother of a fugitive was displayed to us in the same way. I saw 12 surveyors and engineers hanged allegedly for plotting an escape.
Gestapo men organized selections, during which the old, swollen, gaunt, picked by the camp’s authorities, were sent to the gas chamber in Rajsk-Birkenau in groups numbering 1,700-1,800 people. Such selections happened more often, the block seniors and kapos were writing down the numbers and sending them to gas chambers.
The chief camp doctor was a prisoner named Daring, a doctor from Warsaw, who was saving prisoners. When I became swollen from starvation and showed up in the hospital to save my life, which might have meant being gassed, Daring allowed me into the sick-bay, despite the fact that the Gestapo doctor objected and wanted to send me to the gas chamber. After three days the swelling went down, and after ten days a car came and took all the sick to the gas chamber. Again, I was saved by Dr. Dering [Daring?] and the cell doctor, who picked me for work. In July 1944 I was evacuated to Mauthausen.