STANISŁAW KWIATKOWSKI

On 13 December 1945, in Radom, Kazimierz Borys, Investigating Judge from the Second District of the District Court in Radom, based in Radom, interviewed the person named below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the witness testified as follows:


Name and surname Stanisław Kwiatkowski
Age 29 years old
Names of parents Józef and Anna
Place of residence Augustów, Kowala commune
Occupation Citizens’ Militia functionary
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Criminal record none
Relationship to the parties none

On 12 October 1942, I was going, as I always did, to take train from Rożki to Szydłowiec, where I worked as a laborer. When I arrived at the station in Rożki at 7.30 a.m. I noticed that there was a scaffold – two trestles built of unhewn birch wood, with two bars resting across them and linked at their thinner ends – on the other side of the railway tracks. I realized that the Germans were building gallows. The gallows rose above the railroad ties, at a distance of about 15 meters from the railroad track.

The gallows were erected under the supervision of the Gestapo. Several cars arrived when the gallows were still being built. Shortly afterwards, another car, accompanied by a few more cars, appeared and fifteen convicts, 6 women and 9 men, got out of it. Once out of the car, they had their hands tied behind their backs and then they were hanged, one by one, on the gallows. I don’t remember the details of the execution. I was watching it in great agitation, from the attic in which I had taken refuge. However, I do remember that the convicts were lined up on the railroad ties situated under the gallows and that the ties were removed from under their feet after a noose had been put around their necks. I don’t know the people executed in Rożki. One of them, wearing navy blue trousers and upper boots, shouted just before he died: "Long Live Poland"!

At the moment of the execution the gallows were surrounded by soldiers and Gestapo guards with sub-machine guns. The locals weren’t allowed to approach the execution site. People were watching the execution from the nearby birch copse or from their attics. I wish to correct the statement by saying that people were watching the gallows from the birch copse only after all the convicts had been hanged.

None of the passengers who were waiting at the station were allowed to get on the train on which I was going to Szydłowiec.

At about 10.00 a.m. a passenger train arrived from the direction of Radom. It was held up at the station 10 minutes longer than usual. Passengers who were about to board the train were made to get on it not from the side of the station but from the other side, the one with the hanging bodies. This was of course designed to make them look at the victims. Those passengers who were travelling further on, in the direction of Skarżysko, had to watch the hanging bodies through the train’s windows. The next trains that passed through Rożki were held up at the station longer than usual and those passengers who reached their destination in Rożki were forced to alight from the train on the right side, across the gallows, so they could see the hanging bodies.

The bodies were hanging from the gallows until dusk. Then they were taken in a car some 150 meters away from the execution site and buried in a collective pit. In the summer of 1944 the Germans were at the site at which the people whom they had executed were buried. Having screened the area with straw mats, they were doing something there, probably burning the bodies.