Presiding Judge: The Court calls the next witness, Krystyna Żywulska.
Krystyna Żywulska, 30 years old, non-religious, no relationship to the defendants.
Presiding Judge: I advise the witness to speak the truth. Making false declarations is punishable with a prison term of up to five years. Do the parties wish to submit any requests regarding the mode of hearing of the witness?
Prosecution and Defense: We exempt the witness from taking the oath.
Presiding Judge: The witness shall testify without taking the oath. Will the witness please say when and in what circumstances she got into the Auschwitz camp, what she observed in relation to the situation in the camp and the behavior of individual defendants towards the prisoners, and especially towards the witness? If the witness knows any of the defendants, please provide specific facts.
Witness: I arrived at the camp in 1943 and after a few hours it seemed to me that no one could devise anything worse than what I saw. However, when I met older female prisoners, I found out that it used to be much worse, that when we arrived the conditions were a lot better than before. After two months of our stay in those allegedly better conditions, the SS men themselves were surprised that we were still alive. The camp and all camp regulations concerning food and clothing were designed in such a way that the prisoners had no right to survive in those conditions for more than two months.
I could divide the defendants in three categories. One of them is the women whom I met in person: the Oberaufseherin [senior overseer] and her subordinate Aufseherinnen. The Oberaufseherin was a terror of not only prisoners, but also Aufseherinnen. When they saw her, they all became very zealous in order to please her and get promoted. In the camp, she was an almighty mistress and had the right to decide about punishment in the case of any violation. She was very eager to do that and she punished prisoners with flogging by herself and she also reported them. She participated in all searches in the camp. She would turn straw mattresses upside down, beat and kicks us. As a matter of fact, she beat us very efficiently – as if somebody had taught her to do that. In 1943, I saw her dislocate the jaw of a prisoner with one strike. That prisoner’s name was Genia Ułan. Afterwards, she stayed in the camp hospital for several months.
Each of them had her own style. The Oberaufseherin could kill a person with a glance, when she stood by the gate and monitored marching prisoners. We were all terrified to make a mistake and cross the gate line out of step, as if that had been the most important thing. If someone failed to do it and tripped, she could end up kneeling at the camp’s gate for several hours with stones in her hands – it was such a huge crime. The Oberaufseherin abused female prisoners and contributed highly to the Nazi regime. From our perspective, nothing can justify her behavior. She participated in every selection; she really enjoyed it and often laughed doing it.
The post that Brandl occupied was – as it may seem – very gentle. She was the head of supplies, the head of the Bekleidungskammer [clothing storeroom]. I declare that as the head of supplies she has as much blood on her hands as every SS man in the camp. This is because she delayed for several days the distribution of jackets that we wore on the striped clothes, she gave us gauze stockings in December, she distributed high-heel shoes among women who worked in the fields, while the women working in stubble fields by strange coincidence went there barefoot. With those regulations, Brandl caused thousands of deaths. She also distributed blankets with lice in the camp. Lice were just another way to murder people there. It is not true that there were delousing procedures in the camp. People like Brandl nurtured lice in the camp. They were a pretext for stripping all prisoners naked, forcing them to stand in the freezing cold for hours and providing new material for selections and gassing. Apart from that, Brandl also beat prisoners, although she probably beat us differently than the Oberaufseherin. When newly arrived female prisoners were leaving the “Sauna”, clothed by the Bekleidungskammer, we would always say that Brandl was going crazy. If she thought that somebody’s dress was not too long or not too short, that someone was dressed like a decent person, she beat them angrily and made them get changed.
Aufseherinnen: Orlowski, Danz and Lächert were subordinate to the Oberaufseherin. Since it was an extermination camp, it was clear that an Aufseherin serving in a penal company had to be appropriately depraved. Orlowski was such a person. The authorities who had assigned her to that post, were not disappointed. Orlowski beat prisoners with a smile on her face – it was her style of beating. She would beat all prisoners that she met. She also beat us because she had a chance to become the Oberaufseherin. It was the highest post she could assume in the camp.
Danz and Lächert also beat us, although they probably treated those who worked for them better, those in the political department who had become more important prisoners. They did not beat us like Orlowski, but they still beat prisoners in the camp.
The second category consists of those whom everybody knew: Aumeier, Grabner, Müller, Muhsfeldt. Everyone knew that an encounter with them could mean only death. When I was going to an interrogation to Auschwitz, I was trembling all the way, thinking about Grabner and his cruelty. His reputation in that respect was extremely well-founded.
The third category of defendants consists of those who have no name, who were known to prisoners and had direct contact with them. We all knew that they were just guards with dogs, Unterscharführers dreaming of promotion, jealous of Grabner and Aumeier. Everyone would do the same in their shoes. Guards with dogs had one task: to escort prisoners to the command office and watch them. Their position made them so dumb and thoughtless that they would always kick prisoners. By kicking half-dead prisoners, they would just supply new material for selection and gassing, so all of them participated in the murdering of people. It is possible that officers with dogs did not exceed their authority, but they kicked prisoners to please Aumeier. They all joined the extermination camp in order to murder people, so it is impossible to say that some of them did not know or are innocent. Each of them in a way participated in selections, each of them wanted to watch the show when they were off duty, and each of them was jealous of those who carried out the selection, that they were able to choose with a finger who lived and who died. When moving that finger, they felt they belonged to the Herrenvolk [master race]. The leadership itself created such conditions that they did not perceive us as human beings. To achieve that, they used quarantine, which made us resemble cattle. We became similar to cattle and we were no longer perceived as humans – it was easy to kick us and do anything, because they didn’t care at all. Beating was as common as turnip soup. For SS men, there were no innocent people. After a fight with their wife or when they were drunk, they could beat prisoners and never be punished. When they beat us, we did not feel more insulted than tortured. Beating is an insult only for free people. For us, it was a torture.
Some prisoners say, “This SS man was good”. There were no good SS men. If it happened that an SS man caressed a child, and later sent them for gassing, people who saw that knew that that SS man who caressed the child was a human being. But if we saw the SS man sending the child to the gas chamber, we knew he was a criminal.
Dr. Kremer was the camp doctor. The camp doctor is a completely different figure than a doctor outside the camp. His task in the camp was to kill people, maintain an appropriately high mortality and invent methods to increase it. Dr. Kremer, just like others of his kind, did not care for the health of sick people in the barrack. He was not of such a disposition. Dr. Kremer got irritated when he saw papers on the floor. It was a pretext for him for ordering the so-called Wiese [meadow], a duplicitous word in the camp. Female prisoners were driven away to a meadow under the presence that the barracks had to be tidied up. From 2.00 to 6.00 a.m., female prisoners were chased around in the meadow with no blade of grass. Such duplicitous terms were very common in the camp. There was also the Waschraum [washroom]. It was fiction. In the initial period, one could only dream about a drop of water. The “Sauna” was a place where we were only let in for three minutes to take a bath in order to provide new victims for gassing, to get a cold and increase the number of fatalities.
The cynicism included in those terms had nothing to do with their meaning.
In 1944, when an SS doctor took blood from Jewish women from “Canada”] for German soldiers, one of those women refused to give him her blood. He said, “How come you don’t want to donate blood for our fatherland?” No one will ever know and it will remain a secret forever how it happened that he was able to caress a child and send them to a gas chamber at the same time. No one will ever know those nameless who had that blood on their hands.
I do not know who was that SS man who beat me in the Political Department. Someone told him to beat me in order to extort some information from me. I also do not know who was that SS man who poured gas into the gas chambers. When the Court asks for the dates, it is clear that they are needed for evidence purposes, but when the defendants ask us when something happened – they mock us, because they know very well that the prisoners did not know what day it was. We only knew that winter started in August, when we got cold at the roll calls. Lying in the hospital barracks, we did not even know if it was day or night. When there were corpses on the snow, we knew it was winter. When the corpses were lying in mud, we knew it was spring. It is an irony to ask us when it was. Block 25 was also an irony. Everyone knew that it was the block of death. I spoke with the elder of block 25, who was a Slovak Jewish woman. She told me that the block was never provided with food. All people sentenced to death were waiting there. In February 1943, people selected from the camp were transported to block 25. They waited for death for two days. After two days, the block was opened and a lot of corpses were found. It was not possible to get close to the building, because the smell was so bad.
People who survived were taken back to the camp, so some female prisoners were almost unconscious from happiness that they were brought back to life.
However, that very night they were taken to a gas chamber. I am sure it was an order given by the camp authorities, not Berlin. They wanted to count the women one more time, so they were given an illusion of life. They had to wait four days for death.
I spent the second part of my stay in the camp in “Canada”, near crematorium IV. I worked in the Effektenkammer [personal effects storage] and I saw numerous transports led to the crematorium. The year 1943 was a period when 300 people per day died only in the blocks. It was a time when Hungarian transports arrived. Every day, vast numbers of people were transported to the gas chambers and 20,000 were burnt per day. SS men felt excellent. When there was a break between the transports, they were bored and started carrying out selections by themselves. They did their own selections. The SS men also brought Jewish girls, dancers by profession, whose parents had been gassed at night, and made them dance naked in the blocks. Following the famous carnage in Majdanek, when 17 people died, over 300 Jews from Majdanek were sent to the gas chambers. They all looked great, but were taken to the camp and gassed the same night. I do not believe that an order from Berlin could arrive so fast. It was the camp authorities that gave the order to kill them, because those Jews had witnessed many things.
The defendants are guilty not only of murdering millions of people, but also of attempting to wake up the worst instincts in prisoners. They tried to transform us into tools of their crime. The defendants are also guilty, because even the handful of people who survived, had lost their memory, had lost their perspectives for the future and struggle to find their place in the post- war reality. They are guilty of the crime that is inconceivable for other people. In some countries there are no publications on the topic, because people do not believe us, the prisoners. It seems to me that the worst punishment for the defendants, who had murdered millions of people, would be to make them feel like people, to treat them mildly, because we were always talking about revenge. But all the prisoners and myself are far from being revengeful. However, I believe that even death penalty would be too light a punishment for them.
Presiding Judge: Are there any questions for the witness?
Defense: No.
Presiding Judge: Therefore, the witness is excused. I order a 20-minute break.