On 10 October 1945, in Łódź, Judge Z. Łukaszkiewicz, with the participation of Prosecutor J. Maciejewski, interviewed the person specified below as a witness, without swearing him in. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:
| Forename and surname | Aleksander Kudlik |
| Age | 36 |
| Names of parents | Dawida |
| Place of residence | Łódź, Żeromskiego Street 31 |
| Occupation | locksmith |
| Religious affiliation | Judaism |
| Criminal record | none |
On 12 October 1942 I arrived at the Treblinka camp with a transport of Jews from Częstochowa. The transport consisted of 60 wagons, each containing about 120 men, women and children.
After the arrival at the Treblinka railway station, a group of wagons (20) was moved onto the ramp of the camp. I was in the last group of wagons. When the wagons were opened, a group of Germans and Ukrainians drove Jews out of them, hitting them with their rifle butts, whipping them and shouting. At the same time, Jewish laborers with blue arm bands cleared the wagons of waste and the corpses of the people who had died on the way.
After that everybody was herded into a courtyard between the huts, where the people were ordered to strip naked after the men had been separated from the women and children.
Little children and babies were usually separated from their mothers. Babies were very often killed there and then in this courtyard – they were held by their legs and their heads were smashed against the fence.
I saw on several occasions with my own eyes (working later as a laborer) the SS-Sch[a]rführer Zepp from the camp personnel kill children in this manner.
Before the men undressed, the commandant of the camp had selected 30 laborers. I was half-naked then, but taking advantage of a German’s inattention got into the selected group and managed to stay there. For the time being I was then assigned to sorting clothes.
The clothes left in the courtyard had to be carried on the double by the naked men onto piles located behind the hut. Meanwhile, women were shaved by barbers in the hut on the left. This hut also housed the so-called cashier’s room, where laborers, so-called Goldjuden, took valuables and money off the women. Men were deprived of these objects in the courtyard, but very few people handed over their possessions. Banknotes were usually torn to pieces and gold and valuables were not handed over, so the laborers sorting the clothes later had to take people’s possessions out of their clothes.
After some time I was transferred from the sorting of clothes to the sorting of fountain pens, where I worked for about six months.
In the other part of the camp, to which we did not have access, were the gas chambers and pits. A few laborers who did woodwork (especially a man called Wiernik) were able to move between both parts of the camp. I was told that the gas chambers were used to exterminate people by pumping air out and pumping exhaust fumes in. There were ten chambers and they could hold about 5,000 people altogether.
As for the so-called lazarett, it was intended to be used to exterminate the sick, the disabled and little children with no mothers, from each transport, and ill laborers.
I can remember that one day I was ordered to take ill people from a transport of Czech Jews to the lazarett. They were convinced that they would be put in hospital and would not believe they were going to their deaths. In the lazarett, which was surrounded with a high fence, there was a pit, at the edge of which victims were killed with an air rifle, with shots fired into the back of their necks.
As for the number of transports, from my arrival until December 1942 there were three transports daily of 60 wagons each on average. There was a break in transport during Christmas time (from two to three weeks), and later, approximately every other day, new transports arrived. The last transport came at the end of April or in May 1943, from the Warsaw Ghetto. In March 1943 there were three transports of approximately 30,000 from Bulgaria and Greece. There had also been Jews from Czechoslovakia and Germany arriving in the previous transports.
When I arrived at the camp corpses were usually buried in pits; later, they started to be cremated on grates after having been extracted from the pits using Bagier diggers. There were about 1,000 Jewish laborers in the first part of the camp, whereas the other part (containing the gas chambers) had about 500. The laborers were treated with constant cruelty.
I can remember that a trader from Częstochowa, Langner, was stripped naked and tortured by SS-men because they had found money on him. When he fainted, he was doused with water and beaten again. Eventually, he was hung by his legs on the gallows, where he remained for about two hours, calling on the remaining laborers to organize an uprising. Finally, he was shot to death by an SS-man. Incidents like that occurred on a daily basis.
There were frequent inspections in the camp and it is absolutely certain that Himmler himself inspected the camp, since he was recognized by Jewish laborers who knew him from photographs in the press.
During the Christmas break in transports, the laborers were kept busy constantly loading wagons with clothes, shoes and other possessions. The wagons were sent to Germany. Gold and valuables were transported to Lublin in vehicles from time to time. I escaped from the camp on 2 August 1943 during the uprising.
The witness interview report was read out to the witness and he confirmed it by signing it on each page.