Warsaw, 27 November 1947. Judge Halina Wereńko, a member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, interviewed the person specified below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for giving false testimony, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Stanisław Marcinkiewicz |
| Names of parents | Andrzej and Antonina née Niezabitowska |
| Date of birth | 15 April 1900, Warsaw |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Place of residence | Drewnica, Ząbki post office |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Education | secondary and 2-year Pedagogical Institute |
| Occupation | director of the Charity Society boarding house in Drewnica |
During the uprising I was at the Warsaw Charity Society facility for orphaned boys at Freta Street 10 in Warsaw, as director.
Around 6 August 1944, a hospital was set up for the wounded, both insurgents and civilians, in a large room adjacent to St. Jacek’s Church and in the basements under the Kronenberg boarding house, in the kindergarten rooms along the corridor, in the chapter house, in St. Jacek’s Church and in the dungeons under the presbytery.
I cannot give the precise number of the wounded. I know that they lay next to each other, tightly packed. Several dozen died daily, and new ones kept coming in. On 1 September, around 5 p.m., German troops captured a house at the junction of Stara Street and Nowe Miasto, forcing out the civilians and setting the house on fire. I saw this from the courtyard of the facility. On the night from 1 to 2 September, the insurgents left our area. In themorning, German troops entered from the direction of Nowe Miasto. On that day, around 7:30 a.m., a squadron of German planes dropped leaflets calling on civilians to leave the district by 8 a.m., otherwise the Old Town would be razed to the ground. I read one such leaflet. Around 8 or 9 a.m., the Germans entered the premises of the Warsaw Charity Society, giving orders to leave the house (raus). I saw children leave with the Daughters of Charity through the exit onto Stara Street, closer to Mostowa Street. Together with Franciszek Wrzosek (currently employed at the Warsaw Charity Society facility in Drewnica), an employee of the facility, I hid in a shelter we had previously dug under the Nativity play room adjacent to Stara Street. As I learnt later, Kazimierz Ubysz, one of the institution’s charges, had also stayed, hiding in a shelter dug out in the garden of the boarding house. Wrzosek and myself stayed in the shelter for 14 days. During the first week, every day I could hear a significant number of people (women and children, I presume) crying and screaming in Polish, as well as male voices screaming in German, as if appeasing the cries, clearly coming from the direction of Stara Street through the thin wall of the building. During all of this time we could hear sounds of gunshots – loud or quiet on different occasions – from the direction of Stara Street.
When I returned to Warsaw on 18 January 1945 and arrived at the grounds of the Warsaw Charity Society, I saw mattresses lying in a long row down Stara Street, from the end of the Nativity play room almost to the junction with Mostowa Street. Some mattresses bore traces of blood and bullets (the caliber cannot be ascertained).
On 2 September, before noon, it all went silent and I thought that the execution was over. But around noon, I heard cries and piercing screams coming from the direction of the courtyard. Fearing for the safety of the orphans, the charges of our institution, I left the hideout and, hiding behind rubble in a corner of the Nativity play room, adjacent to the gate giving onto Stara Street, I looked out at the courtyard. Through a pipe among the rubble, I saw flames some 15 meters away, between the statue of Our Lady and an institution building adjacent to the first gate onto Stara Street.
I do not know what material was burning. I could make out about 12 wounded people amid the flames, lying on the ground, some of them on stretchers. The wounded, burning, were groaning and crying, those were the cries that had drawn me out of the shelter. I saw SS-men (I recognized the uniforms) bustling around the wounded and pouring a liquid on those who were not yet engulfed by the flames, and then setting them on fire. I retreated to my shelter. I could hear the piercing cries for quite a while, I cannot tell how long exactly, and I cannot specify beyond all doubt where they were coming from. The facility buildings were on fire; I could hear the sounds of the fire as soon as the Germans entered. I did not leave my shelter any more that day. The entrance to the shelter was concealed; that day and the following days, I could hear steps in heavy boots above us, [but] the Germans had not discovered the shelter. On 12 September, Kazimierz Ubysz joined us in the shelter. Coming from the dugout in the garden, he crossed the hall where the hospital was, and thecorridor by the chapel. On 15 September, taking advantage of the Soviet air strike, during which, as I had correctly assumed, the Germans took cover, Wrzosek, Ubysz and I moved to the basement under the Nativity play room, where the bathrooms were. On 20 October, a German patrol took us up to the courtyard. I saw the bodies of men, scattered across the sports grounds, each one at some distance from another, bearing traces of blood and bullets. The Germans showed us the corpses, saying that this was what we were in for, that these were bodies of people who had remained in hiding after the evacuation. I gave the Germans a false explanation, namely that we had been trapped under the rubble of St. Jacek’s Church and that we had got out only after the evacuation was finished. They took us to the command post located on Bielańska Street, near the junction with Tłomackie Street, whence we were sent to St. Adalbert’s Church in Wola. We were escorted by a German soldier from the Wehrmacht, who was driving a vehicle. Being exhausted to thecore (in the basement, we had drunk water in which our charges had bathed, which had been there since before the uprising; we also ate raw peas and groats), I leaned on theladder of the car; at that point the soldier hit me with the stock of his gun, causing an injury to my right arm (the witness shows the scar). From St. Adalbert’s Church, we were sent to the Western Train Station [Dworzec Zachodni] but managed to escape and get to Grodzisk on our own, avoiding the Pruszków transit camp.
When I returned to Warsaw on 18 January 1945, in the building of the Warsaw Charity Society, in the hall where the wounded had lain, I saw heaps of ashes next to the exit leading to the chapter house, as well as inside the chapter house. Near the exit onto Stara Street, in the hall, I saw human bones and skulls. Under the Kronenberg boarding house, in the basement, comprising three chambers, I saw in the first two chambers, counting from the direction of Stara Street, bones and scorched human remains, and in the third chamber, corpses in a standing position, some of them with traces of bullets and decomposing. There was a dozen or so corpses, excluding remains. They were the bodies of the wounded, some of whom I recognized, as I knew them by sight from August 1944 when my charges and I distributed tea and water to them.
Around that time, at the beginning of 1945, in the buildings next to the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Przyrynek Street, in the basement of the care facility for the elderly and the handicapped run by the Daughters of Charity, I saw remains, not fully burnt, of elderly people, mostly women.
I cannot specify the number of corpses, there were plenty of them.
Mother Superior of the Daughters of Charity is currently residing in the care facility at Tamka Street 35 in Warsaw.
At that the report was concluded and read out.