Warsaw, 4 December 1945. Investigating judge Halina Wereńko interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having advised the witness of the criminal responsibility for making false declarations, the judge swore in the witness, after which the latter testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Jan Duchnowski |
| Age | 37 |
| Names of parents | Szczepan and Emilia née Gafkarka |
| Occupation | Polish Radio employee, master’s degree in law |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Puławska Street 49, flat 3 |
| Criminal record | none |
On 7 September, I returned to Poland from the Bergen-Belsen camp. Previously, from October 1943, I was interned at the prison in Łomża, then in Białystok (for five months), then, from February 1944, at the Stutthof concentration camp, and finally at the Buchenwald concentration camp, from May 1944 until the liberation.
I brought to the country a number of accounts I had taken down, certified true by the signatures of those who gave them and concerning the conditions at concentration camps in the territories of Poland and Germany. Among others, I am in possession of the signed account given by Stanisława Michalik from Terespol, Lubelskie voivodeship, who is probably in Sweden now. The account concerns, among others, her internment at the Ravensbrück female concentration camp.
By way of a summary of said account, let me state as follows: Stanisława Michalik was on the so-called Lublin transport, which was a political transport and as such received special treatment. Ms. Michalik very often worked moving wheelbarrows with coal, carrying cement in quintal bags, and moving boulders. Cold and hunger reigned at the camp. The prisoners had no warm clothes. The daily food rations were 30 decagrams of bread and a soup, typically a quarter of a liter, for lunch. There were months when they served soup in slightly larger quantities, that is three quarters of a liter per person. The issuing of lunches was often suspended as a form of punishment. Such punishments were handed down for exiting through a window or trampling the lawn, among others.
On Easter day in 1942, the prisoners worked all day and were not served lunch. In February 1943, the camp command suggested to the Poles during a roll call that they should join the brothel, the so-called puff. The women refused, for which they were punished by having the incoming parcels suspended for two weeks. Jadwiga Kamińska, an interpreter, who was brave enough to explain the women’s stance to the commandant, was incarcerated in the bunker for that.
The executions of the women from the Lublin transport were frequent. Overall, some two hundred women from that transport had been executed by 1945. I do not know how numerous that transport was.
In winter 1945, there were cases of sterilizing Gypsy women, but I do not know how many of them were affected and which ones exactly.
Stanisława Michalik told me that she knew about that from conversations in the camp. She did not say who told her about it.
In February 1943, she was ordered to report to the camp hospital to undergo an experimental surgical operation. She knew what awaited her at the hospital because such operations had been previously performed there. She wanted to hide, but the block elder forced her to go.
Ms. Michalik told me that there were different types of experimental operations, which she knew from conversations she had had at the camp with persons whose names she did not state; these were muscular, infectious-muscular, osseous, and infectious-osseous, whereby parts of muscles or bones were removed and bacteria planted therein. The procedures were performed by Prof. Gebhardt from Hohenlychen, who was assisted by Fischer. Young and healthy women were selected for these surgeries. Ms. Michalik is now 37 and she was one of the eldest selected. Some women underwent multiple surgeries. Ms. Michalik underwent an osseous procedure once. It was extremely painful and morphine was the only anesthetic administered to her. The procedure was scheduled to be repeated, but Ms. Michalik did not report when ordered again, and then she managed to avoid the surgery.
From a person at the camp she did not name, Ms. Michalik learned that a Ukrainian girl (name unknown) had her legs amputated and was then killed. The prisoners believed that Prof. Gebhardt took these limbs to Hohenlychen for experimental purposes.
Ms. Michalik told me that she still felt pain in her legs upon touching, when standing on tiptoes, and when the weather changed. She claims that 72 (seventy-two) women went into surgery. Five cases resulted in deaths.
The dead were Aniela Lefanowicz, Kazimiera Kurowska, Alfreda Prusówna, Zofia Kiecolowa, and Weronika Kraska. With further surgeries in prospect, the women protested with the camp commandant, telling him that they would rather die than be experimented upon. The commandant said that he knew nothing about the experiments. After a while, another 13 women were ordered to report for surgery; they tried to wriggle out of it, which was considered a mutiny, and six prisoners were forcefully taken to the bunker, where they underwent operations in unsanitary conditions.
When the Soviet front was approaching, the women who had undergone surgery were prohibited from leaving the camp. A few days later, there was an attempt to take them away from the roll-call yard, and to that end, they were cordoned off by SS-men. However, as the working units, the so-called kommandos, were leaving for the labor sites, they caused a ruckus thanks to which these women were able escape to other blocks. From that moment on, being aware that the camp authorities wanted to eliminate them, they hid at other blocks, which was possible because of new incoming transports and the resulting flurry of activity.
Ms. Michalik managed to leave the camp on an outbound transport to Belsen after she had changed her number and name. This is where her account concludes.
The report was read out.