AGLAJDA BRUDKOWSKA

Excerpt from report no. 337, the hearing of a witness in the case of crimes committed by the Hitlerite occupiers in Poland.

On 13 June 1946 in Lublin, Judge of the Court of Appeal Remigiusz Moszyński, with the participation of a reporter, retired Judge of the Court of Appeal S. Poznański, acting as a member of the Lublin District and Municipal Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland and pursuant to Article 4 of the Decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 51, item 293) and Article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, heard the person named below as a witness, who having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the provisions of Article 106 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, testified as follows:


Name and surname Aglajda Brudkowska
Parents’ names Aleksander and Julia
Date and place of birth 19 October 1914, Żytomierz
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Occupation physician, deputy head of the Lublin Branch of the Polish Red Cross
Place of residence Lublin, Wieniawska Street 6, flat 30

From March 1941 I worked in the Lublin Branch of the Polish Red Cross as a hospital physician. […]

[…] On 3 May 1943 I was transferred in the group of 22 other women to Majdanek. […]

[…] In April 1944 the camp in Majdanek was liquidated and the sick women were evacuated to Auschwitz. […] […] In the freshly arrived transports, the so-called selections were carried out by SS men and doctors: König and Mengele. An average selection resulted in 20,000 people being selected per day. There were periods during which the selections were carried out every day for three weeks; it was when the Jews from Łódź, Hungary and Slovakia were being brought. At the time of my stay in the camp, the women’s camp in Auschwitz was commanded by one Thumann, whom I knew from Majdanek. Mandl, Drechsler and Binz gained notoriety for their treatment of prisoners.

In September 1944, I was transported to Ravensbrück, also to the Revier [camp hospital], where conditions were the same as in Auschwitz.

In the spring of 1945, a mass “purge” among the sick and the elderly was organized, and as a result, about 5,000 women were sent to death by gas. The selection was carried out by Dr. Winkelmann who was sent to Ravensbrück specifically for this purpose. No experimental surgeries were conducted in my presence.