JANINA CZESŁAWA ŻELAZOWSKA

Warsaw, 26 January 1946. Associate Judge Antoni Krzętowski, delegated to the Warsaw Branch of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, heard Janina Czesława Żelazowska, known in the case, as a witness. The witness was reminded of the oath which she had sworn on 17 August 1945. Then witness Żelazowska testified as follows:

As regards the testimony which I made on 17 August 1945 before Citizen Judge Halfter, I would like to explain that I have determined and am providing the number of bodies exhumed on the premises of the former military prison at Zamenhoffa Street on the basis of my notebook, which contains notes that I had made at the execution site. My notes from that notebook served as the basis for drafting proper formal exhumation reports, the so-called originals, which are now subject to legal examination. I made notes of this kind only in the initial period of my work, in the absence of adequate conditions – later on, we were drafting formal exhumation reports already at the site. I account for the discrepancy between the number of 59 bodies, which was determined in the course of legal examination of the original (formal) reports, and the number of 66 bodies, which I provided during the hearing of 17 August 1945, in the following way: in the notebook with the notes which I had made at the exhumation site, under the items between 1 and 72 – specifically, under items 13, 30, 35, 39, 41, 43, and 48 – I did not enter bodies, but the remains of bodies, which were not marked with a separate number at the site and therefore don’t feature in the original reports. They were buried together with other remains – 11 in number – which feature collectively under item 73 in my notes. In total, then, 18 remains were exhumed and buried anonymously – they are buried in the pit marked with the letter C.

I cannot explain why 14 remains are listed in the original report, and not 18 or even 11 (allowing for mistaking the remains entered under items 13, 30, 35, 39, 41, 43 and 48 for bodies). Items 1 to 6 do not pertain to bodies exhumed from the pit marked with the letter C on the plan on page 15 of the case files, but to bodies recovered from the grounds at the rear of the property at the corner of Gęsia and Zamenhoffa streets. In all probability, these are the bodies of Polish insurgents. After the exhumation they were buried in a completely different location, that is, in the second grave in the Krasiński Garden. This was the case because they were – as I believe – Polish insurgents, and we didn’t want to bury them together with the Jews. Summing up, 6 bodies of insurgents and 7 remains should be deducted from the total number of 72 items; in this way we arrive at the number of 59 bodies (72–19), which was determined in the course of the legal examination of the original exhumation reports and which is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the number of bodies exhumed from the pit marked with the letter C and subsequently buried in that pit.

As for my second testimony, which I made on 15 January 1946, I would like to explain that the numbers which I then provided were the same as those in my testimony of 17 August 1945 because the numbers established in the course of my first hearing were the ones which naturally came to my mind. 200 corpses from Gęsia Street 17 were buried in pit D.

(In the course of the present hearing, witness Żelazowska presented the notebook in question, and the notes made in it were seen to agree with the findings of the present report).