JANINA MISIEWICZ

Warsaw, 15 December 1945. Judge Halina Wereńko interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having advised the witness of the criminal liability for making false declarations, of the wording of Art. 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and of the gravity of the oath, the judge swore the witness.

The witness testified as follows:


Name and surname Janina Eutfrozyna Kazimiera Misiewicz
Age 51
Names of parents Władysław and Zofia
Place of residence Warsaw, Płocka Street 26, the Wolski Hospital
Occupation director of the Wolski Hospital, medical doctor
Religion Roman Catholic
Criminal record none

I was in the hospital when the Warsaw Uprising broke out. I was then the head of a ward and the deputy director of the hospital. We were admitting wounded insurgents as well as civilians; we were not a point of resistance for the insurgents.

During the first days of the uprising, German soldiers came to the hospital alone or in small groups, they were calm, they indicated places where wounded people were lying in the streets, they told us to go pick them up.

On 5 August 1944, around 12.30 p.m., an SS troop of around forty armed soldiers burst into the hospital. They ordered all the people who were staying in the hospital to go immediately to the hall, they also said that the hospital would be immediately burnt down. Everyone who was able to walk gathered in the hall, around thirty patients were even carried out on stretchers.

The group was brought to Płocka Street, lined up in fives, the group of men with doctors separately in the front, a group of women separately behind. I was in a five that was more or less in the middle of the column. On the way I saw a few (I don’t recall exactly), perhaps four corpses with gunshot wounds, they were corpses of patients in blue hospital uniforms, mostly from the tuberculosis ward. I believe that these patients had not been able to keep up with the column.

Since I was walking in the middle, I could see neither the pavement nor the rear of the column. We were brought to a factory hall on Moczydło Street, there we were ordered to arrange ourselves in groups of male doctors, female doctors, male patients, sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul [szarytki], and so forth. New groups of civilians arrived at the hall.

Soldiers in German uniforms (I did not recognize the division) started to take away groups of men. At 6.30 p.m. a group of doctors (in white aprons) and men from the Wolski Hospital were taken away.

Much later I found out from a medical student, now Doctor Jan Napiórkowski, and from a hospital employee, Jan Dąbrowski, that the group of our men and the groups taken away earlier from the factory hall had been executed in Górczewska Street, opposite the house at number 57. A cross is standing there now.

Napiórkowski, Dąbrowski and Father Filipuk, who had been staying in the hospital as a patient, managed to get away alive from the execution site. I, together with a group of women and a few men who had not come out when they had been ordered to, spent the night in the hall, and on the following day, that is on 6 August 1944, we were herded on foot to Wola Fort, where civilians were being gathered. In the evening the entire hospital staff was released and we took up quarters in Jelonki.

On 8 August 1944, our Jelonki hospital made secret contact with the Wolski Hospital in Warsaw. I learned that Doctor Woźniewski with ninety-nine patients and a sister of Saint Vincent de Paul [szarytka], Lucyna Lange, had stayed there. After the SS-men who had thrown out our group had left, the hospital was taken over by a Wehrmacht troop. The buildings were not torched.

At the end of September 1944 I spoke to the sanitary chief of the 9th Army, General Doctor Borman, who at that time had his office in Tworki, about an evacuation of the patients left in the Wolski Hospital or about guaranteeing that hospital buildings in Warsaw would not be burnt. Borman was the only German who treated this issue seriously and humanely, but he told me that there was an order that each and every building in Warsaw was to be destroyed before winter, so there was no hope of saving the hospital.

As the director, I was being informed of what was happening in the hospital in Warsaw. Thus I know that on 24 October 1944 there had been an evacuation of elderly men and women and patients with severe conditions to Cracow, which had been organized by the Wehrmacht in a very humane manner. I know that during September doctors from the Wolski Hospital were able to transfer a considerable number of Polish people from Saint Adalbert Church to the Wolski Hospital as patients, thus saving them from the horrible conditions of the transfer point at Saint Adalbert Church, from the transit camp in Pruszków, and then from deportation to Germany.

At that the report was concluded and read.