On 12 November 1946 in Tarnów, Bronisław Maciołowski, President of the District Court in Tarnów and member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, with the participation of reporter Barbara Juraszowa, heard Edward Wrona as a witness in accordance with Articles 254 and 255 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Having been advised as per Articles 107 and 115 of the aforementioned Code, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Edward Wrona |
| Age and place of birth | 33 years old, born in Tuchów |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Marital status | Married |
| Place of residence | Tarnów, Starowolskiego Street 17 |
| Occupation | Office worker at OZT |
| Before the war, I | worked at the chemical laboratory in Mościce. |
Even prior to the mobilization of 1939 I was called upon as a reserve officer to assume a post in the artillery at the Corps District Command no. 5 in Kraków. The factory I worked in appealed the decision and I was reassigned to the anti-aircraft artillery platoon stationed in Mościce. I became the commanding officer of this unit, because the man who was supposed to be the commanding officer — also a reserve first lieutenant and an employee of the Mościce factory — was given time off work shortly before the outbreak of the war, went to France and was there when the war broke out. If I remember correctly, his surname was Grzędzielski.
As the German army advanced, our platoon was ordered to evacuate towards Zamość, along with other military units in the area. Between Lublin and Zamość we came under pressure from both sides: the German army was advancing from the West and the Soviet army from the East. There, our unit was disarmed and taken prisoner by the Germans. I managed to escape when we were being held in the Orthodox Church in Leżajsk and on 10 October 1939 I returned to my home in Tarnów, on Lipowa Street 5 (now Tertila Street). Sometime later, in the second half of November 1939, engineer Hennel (who is now employed in the Mościce factory) persuaded me to return to work. I did not, however, return to work in the laboratory; I was employed in the measurements section instead. An additional factor in my return to work was a request by engineer Odrycki. Before the war, he was the chief of the acids division and worked on producing nitric acid, using the method devised by Tadeusz Hobler, but he didn’t return to work after the war broke out. He asked me to get his pre-war notes from the company office and deliver them to him. I managed to do this, despite not being employed in the laboratory, because it was then headed by Doctor Hawliczek who gave me unrestricted access to the area. I remained employed at the factory until 3 May 1940. I also got married in that period, in February 1940.
In the early hours of 3 May 1940 my house – in which I lived with my mother, my wife, two sisters and a 16-year-old brother named Ludwik – was surrounded by the Gestapo. I was ordered to open the door and did so. A tall, young Gestapo officer entered. I don’t know his name but I was later told that he was the first chief of the Gestapo unit in Tarnów. He was accompanied by two other Gestapo men. They all talked in German. I told them I didn’t understand German and pointed to my mother, since she spoke that language. She translated our answers for the Gestapo. Our house was searched but they didn’t find anything of interest and only took some court documents from a table drawer; my father died in a railway accident before the war and these documents had been used to establish who was guilty of causing the accident.
I wish to note here that the Gestapo officer had a list with which he compared my answers about my personal data. He then pointed at my brother, who was lying in bed, and asked who that was. Upon being told he is my brother, the officer ordered him to get dressed as well. They let us get dressed and then led us out of the house, while warning my mother and the rest of my family to stay at home for the next two hours. They also warned me and my brother that we weren’t allowed to speak to one another on the way – if we did, we would be executed on the spot. I never found out the surnames of the officer and the other Gestapo men.
We were led to a tenement house on Urszulańska Street that housed the local Gestapo headquarters. There, I was searched and had my documents taken away; they took my factory employee ID, reserve officer ID, pay envelope, etc. Our personal data were collected once again, compared with the data the Gestapo already had, and entered onto a sheet of paper. After some time, other people were led into the room; they were Władysław Wydro and his wife, two Jews and two other people. We were all ordered to stand facing the wall, with our backs to the room.
I’d like to note here that when the Gestapo were searching our house they saw the paintings we had and, apparently, laughed amongst themselves about two of them, namely about ThePrussian Homage by Jan Matejko and a portrait of Marshal Rydz-Śmigły. When we left the house, we both started walking very fast, to outpace the Gestapo men, and I had enough unsupervised time to tell my brother that we mustn’t speak about any organizations and neither of us can betray the other in any way, even in the face of death. One of the Gestapo men must’ve heard that we were speaking — he rushed over to us and threatened he’d shoot us if we kept talking.
The new arrivals at the Gestapo headquarters also had their personal data taken and their belongings searched. A truck arrived in front of the building and we climbed in. We were then joined by various people from other rooms and there were 20 detainees in the truck. We were taken to the yard of the local jail, under Gestapo escort, then told to get out of the truck and stand in two rows. We were approached by Polish guards and one of them warned us that we were going to be patted down (I don’t remember his name). This is when I remembered that I had something incriminating in the top pocket of my jacket — a small piece of paper with news from the London radio, which I was given by a lady that listened in to the broadcasts and passed the news on, to be put in secret leaflets. Frankly, it’s surprising that the paper hadn’t been found during the search at the Gestapo headquarters. I quickly thought about how I could destroy it, asked the Polish guard for permission to go to the restroom and threw it into the toilet. We were patted down and then put in cells. Mine was on the second floor — I don’t remember the number — and I shared it with two other men: Stanisław Białas and some young man from Brzesko. My brother was put in a different cell.
I spent around two weeks in there just waiting, after which I was taken by a Polish guard to be interrogated in a cell on the ground floor. There, I was met by the Gestapo officer who had arrested me and another one — whose name I don’t know — who spoke Polish. While I did understand German and spoke it a little, I told the interrogator that I didn’t really know the language, so the Gestapo interpreter was used. This gave me some time to think about my answers because I’d hear the instructions for the interpreter in German and then his translation for me. They began by taking my personal data; then the officer told me that I should tell them the truth because he already knows everything about me. At one point in the interrogation he did actually read out, from his papers, where I served in the military, what exercises I took part in, what community work I did and that I had received the Cross of Merit for it. He only lacked information about my last military assignment, so I hid the fact that I served in the Mościce anti-aircraft artillery platoon. Eventually, he took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to me. When I refused, objecting that I was a prisoner, the officer politely told me that I was not a prisoner but a guest, convinced me to take the cigarette, lit it for me and began asking if I was Polish. I assented but that wasn’t enough for him; he told the interpreter to ask if I was a hundred percent Polish. When I said yes, he suggested that as such a good Pole I must have been a member of some political organization and that, therefore, I must certainly still be a member of one. Here I remembered that quite a while before my arrest a captain of the Polish Army — whose surname I don’t recall — asked me to procure a military map of Tarnów for resistance purposes. I started wondering if that captain wasn’t a German agent-provocateur. It turned out, however, that the Gestapo didn’t have any actual knowledge about my participation in resistance activities. After the interrogation ended, I heard the lead officer tell the other one that I was verdächtig, which means suspicious. Wanting to allay his suspicions, I turned around in the doorway and asked him for a few cigarettes for my cellmates. He initially refused, saying that smoking was forbidden in prison and that even Polish guards would put us in a dark cell for that, but then he relented and gave me five cigarettes, warning me not to show them to the Polish guards.
I should mention here that during the interrogation, when I denied being a member of any organization, the officer expressed disbelief — he said that, if I was a true Pole, I surely couldn’t just accept my country being taken over by the Germans. Wanting to mislead him, I told him that while I was of course indignant about it, I was also reasonable enough to see that no organization could hope to win against their superior strength. I saw that this flattered him and that was when he offered me the cigarette. But he must’ve not fully believed me, since he called me verdächtig. When I left the interrogation cell, I saw that one of the Polish guards had been eavesdropping. I don’t remember his name. My brother Ludwik later told me that this guard recounted my whole interrogation to him so he would know what to do during his questioning. My brother was questioned on the same day as me and a Polish guard led him up to my cell door afterwards so he could tell me about it. Apparently, the Gestapo interpreter first slapped my brother across the face twice, so hard that he fell on the ground and started crying. The interpreter then switched from harsh to gentle: he patted my brother on the head and told him he wouldn’t be beaten any more if he told the truth. He started asking my brother about my personal data, my military service, my membership in organizations, but my brother feigned ignorance due to young age. The Gestapo man then accused my brother of planning to go to Hungary, which Ludwik denied. Admittedly, he and some of his acquaintances were actually planning to move to Hungary and that plan was probably betrayed to the Germans by one Kozioł from Tarnów, who is now hiding somewhere in the West. My cellmate Stanisław Białas was actually detained in connection with this plan. When my brother denied involvement, the Gestapo man slapped him in the face again.
I was kept in Tarnów prison until June 1940, when I was sent to Auschwitz with 755 other Tarnów prison inmates.
All of the inmates were of Polish nationality except one principal of a Jewish school. Notably, the Germans arrested two of the men as Jews even though they had converted to Christianity, namely attorney Teodor Simche and professor Zdzisław Simche. Ours was the first transport from Tarnów to Auschwitz. The whole thing began in the morning: Polish guards came into the cells, took us to the hall on the ground floor and returned the things that had been confiscated from us upon imprisonment as well as any packages from our families that had been sent to us in the meantime. We were then loaded into five cars and taken to the Jewish ritual bathhouse on Rybny Square. I managed to get in the car together with my brother and we positioned ourselves such that we could watch both sides of the street, hoping to see someone from our family. In the bathhouse we were made to wash in the pool and then led, one by one, to an upstairs room. It was so densely packed that we had to stand right next to each other. Our food was provided by the Red Cross. We remained in that room until the following morning and while I was there I saw my wife through the window; she was trying to deliver a package for me through one of the SS men guarding the bathhouse but he refused to take it. She approached the window next to which I was standing and told me that the guards had informed her, the day before, that we would be transported somewhere so she’d made a package for me but the German guards wouldn’t accept it.
The next morning we were led out into the courtyard, arranged in four rows and marched off to the train station, where we were loaded onto cargo cars and transported to Auschwitz. Overall, we were not mistreated then, either while being led out of prison, in the bathhouse or on the train. The only significant incidents happened if someone opened a window when we were being marched through the town — in that case the German guards fired their rifles in that general direction. We left Tarnów between 8:00 and 9:00 AM and arrived in Auschwitz around 4:00 PM. While on the train, we were not allowed to open windows or smoke the cigarettes that we’ve been given upon leaving prison, but the guards sometimes allowed us to smoke when the train stopped at a station. Our only food came from the packages that we had received from our families while in prison. After arriving at Auschwitz, many of us – including me – didn’t realize where we were because the name of the station was written in German. I scanned the station in more detail and eventually saw the Polish name of the town on one of the benches. Our train was, however, unloaded not at the main station but on a siding that led to the former military barracks and goods warehouse. Besides the military barracks and the warehouse there were also lodgings full of different tenants – men, women, and children – who would leave their homes when they head the train. Upon seeing us, they would turn away from the train and rub their faces, as if they were rubbing away tears. We saw that they were throwing comforters, pillows and other household objects out of the houses. We later learned that these people were being evicted; their houses were demolished.
While we were still on the train, one of the German guards came into the car and asked who knew German. Because no one else was volunteering, I told him I understood it somewhat. He told me to explain to my fellow prisoners that we had arrived at our new home and then went to the other rail cars, probably to deliver the same message. The unloading itself went
| as follows: the driver stopped the train in | the place where the train track intersected with |
| a | road leading into the camp and the prisoners were forced to jump out of the rail cars and |
| run towards the camp, while the SS | camp guards standing along the road punched them, |
beat them with sticks, tripped them over, and set the dogs on them. If any of the prisoners lost their hat, a suitcase, or a parcel in the commotion, they dared not to go back or pick it up for fear of being shot. I must say, however, that I didn’t see anyone get shot. As the rail cars emptied, the driver moved the train along so that the next full rail car would be facing the camp road and the next batch of prisoners would be forced to run along the road. One German by the name of Palitzsch was particularly zealous in beating the prisoners during the unloading – I later learned that he was the camp Rapportführer.
At that time the camp had only one, large brick building, surrounded by two rows of barbed wire with four guard posts on the corners of the perimeter; the guards were armed with machine guns. All the prisoners ran towards that building and were stopped in the yard. Both my brother and I managed to run the whole distance quickly, without getting punched or any other incident. The road from the train tracks to the building was around 50 meters long and SS-men stood in rows along both sides. The SS-men who stood at the courtyard gate also beat the prisoners and in the courtyard we were met by around 30 German prisoners, mostly criminals – our future Kapos. They arranged us in groups of ten, all the while mercilessly dealing out punches to the head. I was punched in the face by the particularly cruel Lagerälteste [camp senior] Bruno.
After we were arranged in tens, the list of our surnames was read out and upon hearing their name each prisoner had to shout “hier” [present]. Whoever answered in Polish – “jest” – was beaten. The camp bigwigs looked on from behind the barbed wire fence. Among them I noticed a smartly dressed, portly man that I later learned was Höß. After this roll call, we were directed to run, in groups of five, from the front courtyard to the building basement; we ran along the longer side of the building to a door on the shorter side. People in the groups were fearful: they didn’t know where they were running to or what awaited them there. In the basement, we entered a hallway in which we were ordered to leave all of our luggage, outer clothing and any parcels we had. They were all piled in the first room to the right of the basement entrance. We were then taken to the next room, ordered to undress completely and march through another door with our clothes (jackets, pants, shoes, and underwear) in our hands. In this third room all of us had our heads shaved with a dull electric razor. The shaving was done by a Polish prisoner overseen by an SS-man. The shaved men would have their hair painfully torn out with the dull razor and have small patches of hair left on an otherwise shaved scalp. We were then directed to another shaving room, in which each prisoner had to lie down on table and have all of their body hair removed. This was done with dull razors by Polish prisoners – mostly barbers – who were so afraid that their hands shook the whole time. They would also often be beaten by their German overseer for working too slowly. As a result, they would frequently cut the skin while shaving, so many of us were left with cuts in our armpits, in the groin area and other such places. The end result was that a completely shaved, frightened prisoner with bleeding cuts on his body would run out of that room to his next destination and those who saw him, while waiting their turn, thought that he had just been through some medical procedure.
After the shaving came the washing – the prisoner would put his clothes to the side, run under a cold shower, and then immediately, without drying off, take his clothes and run naked to the next room. There, administrative workers would take down each prisoner’s personal data and assign them a prisoner number, telling the prisoner to not forget it, since each prisoner would now be issued their clothes according to their number and not their name. I was assigned the number 206 and my brother got the number 457. Once the prisoner number was recorded in the documents, the prisoner would leave the room and enter a hallway where they would dress and be assigned to one of the rooms on the second story of the building. That story consisted of two large rooms on opposite sides of a hallway and smaller rooms in the middle, intended for the guards or the Kapo. I was assigned to the room left of the entrance, while my brother was assigned to the one on the right.
This assignment process ended by around 6:00 PM. When it was done, internal camp commandant Fritzsch – who had authority over the prisoners but not over staff – came into our room and addressed us in German, while an interpreter translated into Polish. He said: “You are now prisoners, not people. Poland is gone once and for all – it’s now just a fever dream. If you work for the German state, you can expect to see your families in the future. If you don’t – you’ll never see them again.” He then left, walked over to the other side of the corridor and entered the other room, to deliver his address there. There were around 400 men in each of the two rooms. The floor was covered with heavily trampled straw and dust would rise from it with every step. At night we would all have to lay down on this straw on our sides, very close to one another, and spend the whole night in the same position; there wasn’t enough space to sleep any other way. The sick were in the same room as the healthy – in our group we had, among others, a prisoner with such a bad case of syphilis that his whole body was oozing pus. He slept with us and when we tried to at least reserve one blanket specifically for him, so he wouldn’t infect anyone else, the German Kapos refused our request and intentionally gave that blanket to someone else the next night. Whichever healthy prisoner was issued that blanket would sleep uncovered that night, for fear of being infected through this pus-dripping rag. Furthermore, at night all the windows and both iron doors on the corridor that lead to the staircase would be shut. Once, a young man fell into some sort of amok for lack of fresh air; he started screaming, running around and trampling the other prisoners. We eventually managed to calm him down and then tried to carefully open the window to let some fresh air in. As soon as we opened it a bit, shots were fired from the guard post outside. The noise attracted the attention of the watch commander, an SS-man, who ran into the room and rushed to close the window, trampling the prisoners even more.
When Fritzsch was first addressing our group, professor Simche fainted. One of the guards said that this was a Jew; the guards threw the professor outside – into the corridor – and said that if he didn’t get up in three minutes, he’d be shot. Simche got up with the last bit of his strength and was then supported in line by fellow prisoners.
The part of the building behind the iron doors had no toilets, so two iron cauldrons were put it to fulfill that role. That wasn’t enough, given the number of people, and the waste would spill out. Prisoners would later be ordered by German overseers to pick it up with their bare hands.
The building served as the quarantine for new arrivals and I spent six weeks there.
Lights-out went as follows: at around 9:00 PM we were given the signal to undress and lie down on our designated places on the straw. We would then talk amongst ourselves, keeping an ear out for the footsteps of Rapportführer Palitzsch. When we heard him going up the stairs, we would all assume the sleeping position but take care to keep our eyes open. Palitzsch would appear in the doorway and, in the deafening silence, check if any of the prisoners had their eyes closed. If he didn’t like the look of some prisoner, he would run through the mass of prone men, stepping on their hands and feet, and trample the victim with his boots, nearly breaking the poor man’s ribs. He would usually pick men furthest away from the entrance as his victims, so he’d have the opportunity to abuse as many others as possible on the way. He would then return to the doorway and blow his whistle.
The prisoners would have to instantly shut their eyes and snore as loudly as they could – if Palitzsch wasn’t pleased with the performance, there would be more trampling. He would leave the room, but the prisoners would have to keep snoring until they heard the iron door shut and his footsteps die down on the stairway. Only then could we breathe a sigh of relief and talk quietly amongst ourselves.
Palitzsch would come again in the morning, around 5:00 AM, and check if we were all snoring properly, with our eyes closed. If anything wasn’t just right, we’d be in for another trampling. He would then blow his whistle and we’d all have to immediately spring to our feet and stand at attention. If anyone lost their balance or had to adjust their posture – and Palitzsch would usually find a man guilty of that somewhere on the far end of the room – the Rapportführer would run over to the poor soul, shoving the other men aside (even though the room was too crowded for them to move out of the way), and pummel him with his fists.
After the morning inspection was over, we would go to the yard to get our breakfast – herbal tea and one kilogram of bread for five men. It was military-style rye bread.
After breakfast we’d be ordered to do morning exercises, such as walking like a duck, jumping like a frog, standing face to face in pairs and spinning very fast, or rolling on the ground in our clothes. If any prisoner did the exercises too slowly, the SS-men and the German Kapos – who claimed to be sailors from mutinied German ships – would beat us with sticks and shovel handles, punch us or kick us. When someone collapsed and passed out during the beating, they’d be thrown on the ground next to the building wall and doused with water. Camp higher-ups, including commandant Höß, would often come to look at those morning exercises; we feared these visits because the German Kapos would treat us worse and beat us harder then, to make a good impression on the bigwigs. Höß never ordered them to stop beating us when he was present at the exercises – on the contrary, he seemed pleased.
At dinnertime we had a half hour long break. We would get one dinner course: a soup that looked mostly like water with some herbs, grass and unpeeled potatoes thrown in. Then back to the exercises until 8:00 PM, when we got supper. We’d get herbal tea or (obviously ersatz) black coffee and usually also our bread ration that was supposed to be both for supper and breakfast. The prisoners would, however, mostly eat it all at once – especially since there was no way to store the bread until morning – in which case they’d only have herbal tea for breakfast the next day.
In my brother’s room, there was a young prisoner by the name of Stanisław Czupryna, a middle-school student from Tarnów who had gone somewhat mad after being beaten by the Tarnów Gestapo. He walked around in a daze and gave the impression of being an unthinking animal rather than a human. When he was in quarantine, he once picked up a cigarette butt dropped by a German guard and put it in his pocket. The guard reported this as misbehavior and Czupryna was punished with an hour on the so-called “post”.
Despite the fact that our room was supposed to be a quarantine, no care was taken with regards to hygiene or sanitation. As I’ve already mentioned, the sick were housed together with the healthy. Additionally, the only well pump — in the courtyard — constantly broke, so we didn’t have any water to wash ourselves. Moreover, the straw we slept on had so many lice in it that we were all infested — if anyone put their hand under their armpit or in another such place, they’d pull out a whole mass of lice. Scabies was also common. Despite all this, prisoners would be taken to the hospital only once they developed fever due to their wounds and lost consciousness. Anyone who was less sick but reported themselves as sick during roll call would just be beaten in punishment.
Besides Stanisław Czupryna, whose story I’ve already told, there was another young boy in our group — from somewhere around Nowy Sącz — who was not mentally well. The German kapos and guards made fun of him. One time they told him to completely undress, threw a blanket around his shoulders, gave him a pickaxe and told him to go dig in the courtyard. He was terrified and dug so intensely that he eventually fell on the ground completely exhausted. Then the kapos started beating him and afterwards they shut him in a dark cell. When he screamed in the cell, they went and beat him so hard that his skin turned purple all over. He died a few weeks later.
There were other notable incidents during my time in quarantine. Once, we were just getting ready to go to our room after supper when an SS-man nicknamed “Fajeczka” [little pipe] stopped the priests, monks, and converted Jews. He made them sings blasphemous psalms he composed himself – first in Hebrew and then in German. I know the psalms were blasphemous because I understood them the second time around, in German. Another period of particular abuse was whenever we were supposed to go either from our room to the courtyard or from the courtyard back to our room. All the prisoners were then supposed to run on the double and the less agile ones would be beaten by the German Kapos and the SS-men who stood along the way. When we were running from the courtyard into the building, there would often be a hold up; the prisoners couldn’t all fit inside quickly enough. When that happened, the Kapos and the SS-men would beat us over the heads with long, wooden poles. Once we were all inside or outside, as the case may be, our overseers would often order us to redo the whole procedure and take every opportunity to beat us for supposed carelessness.
When we were in quarantine, we suffered such hunger that some of the prisoners tried to steal the spoiled, molded bread that had been deposited in the building’s basement right after our arrival. Any prisoner caught stealing that bread would be beaten as punishment.
Around 20 July 1940, we were preparing to leave quarantine. We were told to collect all the straw from our room, carry it to the courtyard and burn it. Because there was lots of it, a lot of heat was coming from the fire. “Fajeczka” told one of the priests to embrace a Jew – the principal of the Tarnów Jewish school – lie down on the ground and roll towards the flames. They got so close that they were losing consciousness and the Jew’s clothes caught fire. “Fajeczka” shouted “Auf!” [Up!], the priest and the Jew scrambled to their feet and ran away from the fire, half-dazed.
All these experiences during the quarantine period transformed all the prisoners mentally: they became nearly animals, following just their instincts to survive and avoid being beaten. We were all on the lookout for any signs of danger. If we heard someone shout “Auf!” or “Komm hier!” [Come here!], we would immediately dart in that direction. We had no time to think about what we were doing or where we were going.
Two weeks after our arrival in Auschwitz another group was sent to the camp – 140 prisoners from Wiśnicz. They were, however, exempt from the quarantine process because they had already been tried in Wiśnicz. They were only subjected to a shower in our building’s basement, issued their striped camp clothes and sent directly to the camp proper, i.e., the Stammlager [parent camp]. While we were in quarantine, it happened once that a Polish train driver delivered a load of clothing to the camp and, as it was being taken from the train to the warehouses opposite our block, he took out a packet of cigarettes from his pocket but he did this so energetically that the cigarettes scattered and some of them landed in our barbed wire enclosure. This was noticed by one of the guards in the corner outposts. As a result, the driver was immediately arrested and put in our block.
Before we left quarantine, each of us was questioned regarding our profession and assigned an appropriate job in the camp. Obviously, many members of the intelligentsia, attorneys, judges or teachers didn’t admit to their real profession and claimed to be butchers, locksmiths or laborers of similar sorts. I said I was a chemical lab technician. They were looking for a lab technician to operate the water sanitizing equipment that would provide water to the prisoners’ blocks and sanitize the water from the well they were digging, so I was assigned that job. I was afraid because I didn’t know how to do it, but the other engineers from the Mościce factory – who were quarantined with me – told me what to do. I went to that job and ended up working at the boiler room until 1 November 1944, when Auschwitz was partially evacuated and I was sent to the camp in Litoměřice near Prague.
In the boiler room, I kept cats and a turtle that the Germans had brought me at one point. The cats saved me from a lot of trouble when the Gestapo came to inspect the boiler room because they were so domesticated that they’d jump into the Germans’ arms and the Germans always had a weakness for pets. Another noteworthy thing happened sometime in 1943, when the German kapos came and asked me to fry some potatoes on the iron stove I had in the room.
I should explain that, because the boiler room was located in a basement and the engines used to power it were susceptible to rusting in high humidity, I had an iron stove in the room to keep the place dry. Thus I could gain influence with the kapos, which I later used to improve the lot of the Polish prisoners from Tarnów whom they oversaw. Once, Lagerälteste Bruno caught me frying the potatoes and demanded to know who they belonged to (there were five pans of them). I didn’t want to betray the kapos, so I told him they were mine. In response, Bruno told me to stretch out across a stool, took an iron coal shovel and smacked my backside five times. Then he asked again and I told him again that they were mine. The process repeated; I got five series of five smacks each, twenty-five in total. I must have, however, impressed him with my resolve — in the end he said he knew they weren’t mine but would let me keep them, seeing as I didn’t betray my fellow prisoners.
Since that time, I always had some influence with him as well, provided that I also fried potatoes for his lackey.
Going back to my time in quarantine for a moment, I’d also like to add that before we were allowed to move to the camp proper, specifically to Block 3, we had to go through a sort of disinfection process. The prisoner would have to go into a trough full of water and wash themselves with soap that looked more like a block of sand. The water in the trough wasn’t changed between prisoners, so it was dirty from all the previous washing. We were then inspected. Needless to say, this kind of bath wasn’t enough to get rid of all the dirt we’d accumulated over the six weeks we spent in quarantine. Yet, if dirt was noticed behind the ears or elsewhere on the body, or a louse was found during the inspection, the prisoner would have to go back and take a second “bath” in the trough. I was assigned to Block 3a and so was my brother. We were ordered to sweep the paths and squares near our block and further in the camp. This gave us the opportunity to collect many cigarette butts, which made our fellow prisoners very happy.
It is noteworthy that at roll call right after we were assigned to Block 3, we were told that carrying around spoons, knives, matches, or lighters was strictly prohibited – any prisoner caught in possession of such objects would be sent to the punitive unit, which was given the hardest labor. Around two weeks after we were assigned to prisoner blocks, a prisoner by the name of Wiejowski managed to escape the camp. When his absence was discovered, Rapportführer Palitzsch was ordered by Commandant Fritzsch, subordinate of Commandant Höß, to assemble the prisoners from the relevant block and keep them standing in the square without food until Wiejowski showed up. So we stood there 36 hours straight. We were eventually allowed to go, even though Wiejowski was never found. All the prisoners in the camp, that is over a thousand men, were subjected to this punishment of standing in the square. It was called off only once; approximately 90% of them collapsed on the ground, either from hunger or from exhaustion. The men who slept right next to Wiejowski were beaten extremely harshly. I saw that one of these men, who received 120 lashes to the backside while stretched out on a special stool, had an open wound the size of a fist. I am certain that all this occurred with the explicit knowledge of commandant Höß, since his house was right opposite the camp and he must have noticed that the whole camp was standing idle even though there was urgent work to be done on dismantling the old barracks and building new blocks.
The prisoners worked barefoot and without any headgear until the end of October 1940. Then, when snow fell, the prisoners who were digging up potatoes were issued shoes, some were given wooden clogs, and yet others made makeshift shoes using small bits of wood.
Because our camp clothes weren’t issued according to our height and size, some had pants that were too big and others, too small. It was common for the pants to fit so badly that they fell down, but we weren’t allowed to tie them with anything and had to just hold them up with our hands. When I and my brother both fashioned ourselves makeshift belts out of electric cables, we were beaten by a Kapo and had to give him the “belts”. I’d like to mention here that prisoners in each company were marked with circles on their backs and chests. Now, going back to the punishment of standing 36 hours straight, I’d like to add that cauldrons with food were brought to the square, but the food was not distributed. After a while they were wheeled off to the pigsty and the food was given to the camp pigs. A similar thing happened once to us in Block 3 when we folded our blankets wrong: at dinner everyone was given their ration of soup but we weren’t allowed to eat it; we had to lift the bowls above our heads, march to our place, place the bowls on the ground, then turn around and march off to work. That food was also given to the pigs. I don’t remember which Blockführer [block leader] invented this punishment for us.
While I was housed in Block 3, some prisoner deaths occurred, but at that time the dead were still being buried in the ground in coffins. The only unusual thing was that a few coffins would always be kept at the ready in the block corridor, in full view of the prisoners. They were painted black and made by prisoner-carpenters. In the last quarter of 1940, a small crematorium was built opposite the camp command. It was later repurposed as a gas chamber and eventually demolished when the big gas chambers and crematorium were built (in Birkenau).
My assignment sweeping paths and squares while at block 3 lasted for about two weeks. I was then sent to dig up potatoes and after about four weeks of that I ended up at the boiler room — or pump room, to be exact — which I have already described. During my work in the fields in the Wirtschaftskommando [agricultural kommando], the friendly, local civilians provided us with as much additional food as they could. The unit was disbanded when it was discovered that the SS guards were successfully being bribed and allowed prisoners to obtain tea and bread.
During my whole time in the camp, the head commandant, that is the one with authority over both prisoners and staff, was Rudolf Höß. There was only a short break, lasting around three months in 1943, when he was sent somewhere else and a gentler camp policy was instituted. The substitute head commandant was some Wehrmacht colonel. He called a special meeting with all the prisoners and announced that Poles would no longer be sentenced to death and, furthermore, that as long as he was in Auschwitz they would not even be harmed, the sick would be hospitalized and treated, and only Jews unfit to work would be sent to the gas chambers and burned in the crematoria. He forbade the beating of prisoners. I personally saw once that he noticed the senior of block 18 hit a prisoner in the face, he called that senior over and had him punished with 25 lashes to the backside. After three months, Höß returned to Auschwitz and rumor among the prisoners was that it was on account of his wife. She was supposedly Himmler’s secretary. She really loved the flower and vegetable garden that a Silesian prisoner had made and managed for her. She saved him twice from the “death wall” of block 11. He claimed he was a Volksdeutsch, apparently out of fear. Höß’s wife liked him so much that she allowed him to meet with her in Höß’s house. On the other hand, she treated Poles and other prisoners very harshly; if she noticed that a prisoner made even a trivial mistake, she would immediately have him punished.
Going back to the matter of that Wehrmacht officer who was our substitute commandant, I’d like to mention something about the Political Department. That Department, headed by a Gestapo officer called Grabner, was truly the bane of the camp, since Grabner would issue death sentences for minor misdemeanors. Now, the substitute commandant removed Grabner from the camp, moved the snitches of the Political Department to camps outside of Auschwitz and significantly downsized the Political Department staff. When Höß came back, he didn’t reverse these changes.
Commandant Höß was certainly fully aware of everything that happened in the camp. Firstly, he would often make rounds and inspect the whole camp, so he must have known what happened at the block 11 “death wall”. Secondly, the Silesian man who worked as the personal gardener of Höß’s wife told me that, when she once saved him from death, she complained to Höß that he had signed a death sentence on her gardener without telling her. He further told me that Höß gave his approval for death sentences by undersigning the lists of those condemned to death. Höß did what his wife wanted because she was Himmler’s secretary and had his ear; when Himmler visited Auschwitz, he promised her he wouldn’t move Höß from the camp until the end of the war. It is doubtless because of her influence that Höß, a simple bricklayer by trade, climbed all the way to the rank of colonel.
I also know that Höß personally visited block 11 as well as [lacuna — one line at the bottom of the page seems to be missing]. Besides, there was another escape from Auschwitz and, in that case, the escapee’s elderly mother and young fiancée were both brought to the camp, dressed in camp clothes and stood on a podium at the main camp gate (the one with the motto “ Arbeit macht frei”). They were made to hold up a sign stating: prisoner so-and-so — I don’t remember the name — has run away from camp and until he is caught or reports himself back both his mother and his fiancée will remain in the camp. The women’s names were also given on the sign, but I don’t recall them either. The whole announcement was signed: Rudolf Höß. The two women were then sent around all the various Auschwitz subcamps with the sign.
The report was read out and signed.