Warsaw, 12 August 1947. A member of District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Warsaw, Acting Judge Halina Wereńko, interviewed the person named below as a witness, without an oath. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and the obligation to speak the truth, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Michał Jerzy Tetmajer, former prisoner of the Gross-Rosen camp, no. 12,423 |
| Parents’ names | Julian, Antonia née Ambrożewicz |
| Date of birth | 12 October 1909, Kiev |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Marszałkowska Street 18, flat 18 |
| Education | engineer architect |
| Occupation | engineer in the Main Office of Planning |
On 15 July 1943 I was arrested by the Gestapo in the headquarters of the Gwardia Ludowa [People Guard] at Chełmska Street 26 in Warsaw, together with my female colleague Kokoszko, nickname “Wacław”. In the process of the conducted search, the Gestapo took possession of a file including orders from operations and lists of our commanders’ nicknames. The Gestapo had learned about the GL headquarters whereabouts from a confession forced out of an organization member nicknamed “Leon”, who had been captured in the operation of a grenade assault on an SA outpost on Ujazdowskie Avenue. After I was arrested, they kept me in the Gestapo building (Szucha Avenue 25) for a month, and then moved me to Pawiak prison.
During the interrogation on Szucha Avenue and three interrogations during my stay in Pawiak, I admitted to being a part of the Gwardia Ludowa, but I did not expose any of my colleagues, despite being severely beaten, especially in the first interrogation. In the summer of 1944, due to the Eastern Front moving in closer, especially after Lublin was taken by the Red Army, rumors of a prisoners’ evacuation began circulating. I heard that Polish railway workers refused to provide wagons for the evacuation. On 27 July there was a commotion in the prison – I presumed they would be moving us.
The next day, in the morning hours, we were driven out of our cells onto the courtyard, given a loaf of bread, one for every two prisoners, and lined up to form a transport.
Only the sick remained in Pawiak, along with Dr. Loth, currently employed in Wolski Hospital (the son of a professor).
Women were also evacuated. A statement on this matter could be made by Dr. Tarłowska (currently residing on Marszałkowska Street 18) and the female prisoner Maria Rutkiewicz (currently employed in CK PPR in Warsaw, on the corner of Róż Avenue and Stalin Avenue).
How many were evacuated, I cannot say precisely – it could have been a couple thousand by the looks of it. Detailed numbers could be provided by the metallurgy director Lesz, employed in the Pawiak office at the time.
The Gestapo men from Pawiak and newly recruited Ukrainians and Georgians in SS uniforms were escorting the transport and later the train. I was in one of the first groups to leave. We were driven in fives, our hands tied with wires, to a sidetrack inside the ghetto, not far behind the former military prison on the intersection of Gęsia and Zamenhoffa Street. A freight train of 30 wagons was already awaiting us. The guards were saying that the Germans themselves brought the wagons because the Polish railway people didn’t want to. A wagon could normally fit up to 40 people, but 120 men were squeezed into each. We were getting in after being freed from the wires that tied us. The women were loaded into the wagons closer to the locomotive; near Kalisz, these wagons were detached and – as I learned later – transported to the camp in Ravensbrück.
The wagons were very dirty, with the windows boarded up and covered in wire. There was no toilet, and after loading us in, the door was closed. It was in the July heat. In the wagon I was in, during the first night two of the prisoners suffocated, in the adjacent one – 40. That was the time when Fijałkowski – the general’s brother, a bookkeeper by profession, who used to be employed in the Pawiak office – died due to a heart failure in my wagon. I was working with him in an Arbeit cell, where Schreiber Wanat, famous for his escape from Pawiak, currently a shop owner in Łódź, used to come. One of the prisoners in my wagon lost his mind, and another mentally disturbed one was thrown into our wagon by the SS. The train was moved from the ghetto sidetrack onto another one, I don’t know exactly if it happened near Gdański Station or in Praga [district]. We stopped for the whole day. After that, on 29 July, the train stopped somewhere near the Włochy suburbs, by a stream. A couple of prisoners were asked to carry the corpses out of the wagons. I saw some of the dead bodies being thrown into a ditch, but I don’t know if they were left there or loaded onto another wagon. I’m also not sure how many bodies were carried out from the wagons. The prisoners filled the containers they took from Pawiak with the water from the stream. Then the wagons were locked before the train set off.
At the next stop, in Skierniewice, I also witnessed bodies being carried out of wagons, but I cannot estimate the number and I’m not aware what happened with them later. In the wagon I was in, nobody died on the way to Skierniewice. The next stop was in Żyrardów. A lot of civilians came to help, giving us milk and other products. We were told that the Uprising had broken out. I noticed that local Wehrmacht and even the Gestapo men escorting us allowed the civilians to provide us with food, whereas the local SS were driving them off, seemingly in conflict with the Wehrmacht soldiers. In Łódź, the local gendarmerie gave out cups of coffee to us at the station. In the Wartegau area we weren’t watched that closely. At the next few stops near Łowicz and Głogów, the guards allowed us to go use a lavatory and to get water, in order. Naturally, not everybody had the time to do so, and only a couple managed to escape. During the day, the doors were opened to let in some air. We were heading into the unknown. On the fourth day we arrived at the Gross-Rosen station. SS men with dogs were picking us up. Lined up in fives, we were driven four kilometers on foot. While we were marching, the local villagers and German kids were throwing rocks at us, shouting ‘ polnische banditen’. After we reached the camp, my personal information was recorded and I was assigned a number, then we were bathed. Then we went to block 14. I received the number …. [missing]. Out of our Pawiak transport, two transports were formed and sent to a commando in Brzeg after a couple of days. I was placed in block 7 along with about a thousand other prisoners.
Regarding work allocation, I was assigned to the so-called Steikommando made up of several hundred prisoners, who were directed to the roll call square in order to practice foot drill and singing. We were employed within the camp’s premises according to its needs. By that point, there was already a certain laxity in the discipline.
Very often I was able to run off from the roll call square and hide in the tents in front of the crematory, where bags of old shoes were lying. Before my arrival, the Steikommando was doing the job of ripping off the old soles from the upper part, and then the work was called off. Hiding between the bags, I could observe how groups of people were led into the crematory, then I heard screams. It was commonly known that prisoners taken to the crematory were receiving phenol injections. The groups were led by an SS man whose surname I don’t know. Sometimes, however, I wouldn’t manage to get away and I had to carry food to the blocks or bring the rocks used in the block construction. There wasn’t enough space in block 7, with a thousand prisoners sleeping on pallets in a common room in such a way that the only possible position was on the side. The block senior was called Paul, I don’t recall the surname, a former Polish Army officer, a volksdeutsch who had been the Lageraltester for some time before my arrival. He came to Gross-Rosen from Auschwitz. The block senior would maintain discipline, make sure the barracks were clean, giving beatings to the prisoners with no mercy. I didn’t seen him murder anybody, though.
I don’t know the surnames of those in power nor of their crew within the camp. A former Gross-Rosen prisoner, Jerzy Albrecht, could provide their personal data (currently a PPR [Polish Workers’ Party] secretary in Warsaw, Jerozolimskie Avenue 57).
In September 1944, I was present on the roll call square during a public hanging of a Russian from Kiev, whose surname I don’t know, for telling some Ukrainian off for collaborating with the Germans. My friend from Pawiak, Rostworowski, was doing time in Strafkompanie for political talk at that time. After the Strafkompanie ’s roll call, during the evening work on digging anti-aircraft ditches in the camp, I was secretly providing him food and medicines. Rostworowski was severely ill, but he told me that the SK block senior Vogel said he wouldn’t let him go to the rewir [infirmary] unless he broke a leg. Sometime after that conversation, Rostworowski jumped from a cliff in the quarry, but only broke two ribs. He still didn’t go to the rewir, and Vogel finished him off. An autopsy carried out by Polish doctors from the rewir (including Prof. Michałowicz) indicated pneumonia and two broken ribs.
At the end of September 1944, along with a transport of a couple thousand prisoners who didn’t have a permanent occupation in the camp, I left for Sachsenhausen, and then to Heinkel’s aircraft factory near Oranienburg. I was there only for two weeks and then transported to Schlieben, a Buchenwald outpost, where an ammunition factory was being run by Jews and other prisoners. I worked there as a carrier, loading wagons. The camp wasn’t guarded well, we worked outside the barbed wires and maybe that’s why the Poles were moved from there.
By the end of October or at the beginning of November 1944, I arrived at Buchenwald camp. Most of my transport was taken to Oranienburg and to clear debris in Berlin. I found myself in a Buchenwald outpost in [Bad] Langensalsa near Weimar, where the prisoners were working at Henkel’s aircraft manufactory. I worked as a warehouseman in the electromechanical section.
On 1 April 1945, due to the front getting closer, about a thousand prisoners were driven out of the outpost to Buchenwald, on foot. A few days later, I was on the way to Weimar along with about 4.5 thousand prisoners sent from there.
The way to the Weimar camp was strewn with corpses. The Ukrainians in black uniforms escorting us were also shooting the weak prisoners. We were going from Weimar to Dachau for three weeks. From 4.5 thousand prisoners, only 1.2 thousand made it. The journey was horrible. Even though we were given some provisions in Buchenwald, the escorting guards took everything from us and we were starving. Many people ran off on the way, but the Germans from Sudety and the Czech volksdeutsches dragged them back to the train. Then, the guards ordered them to do exercises and beat them on the heads with batons till they died. The staggering ones were taken to the mortuary wagons – there were two of them, initially roofed, then open. I saw heads of the dead, blue and swollen from beating or from the temperature. Each wagon was filled with 120 people. With their number decreasing on the way due to deaths, SS men would bring the prisoners from the last wagons in order to empty and detach them. Two times on the way, the corpses were buried in mass graves.
Near Pilsen, SS men drove off Czech civilians who attempted to hand us some food and water.
On 30 April 1945, the transport arrived in Dachau. The prisoners were allowed to drink raw, dirty water from a stream nearby. As a result, many suffered from dysentery. On 1 May the Dachau camp was taken by the American army, who came quickly having seen the wagons with corpses left behind from our transport, and the corpses of Jews and Russians who had been locked up in wagons by the Germans and left to die.
I’m not able to give the surnames of the guards escorting the transport from Buchenwald to Dachau.
The report was hereby ended and read out.