On 1 February 1946, in Koszalin, deputy prosecutor of the Special Criminal Court in Koszalin, Kazimierz Nowak, acting pursuant to art. 20 of the provisions of the Criminal Code, heard the person named below as a witness without oath. Having been warned of the criminal liability for false testimony and informed of the content of art. 107 of the Criminal Code, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Leszek Turkiewicz |
| Age | 29 |
| Parents’ names | Ludwik and Eugenia |
| Place of residence | Poznań, Wybickiego Street 4 |
| Occupation | building technician |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
On 3 August 1942, I was arrested by the German gendarmerie and the Ukrainian police in the town of Mostyska, Lwów province. I was taken away to Grodek Jagielloński and placed under arrest. On 13 September 1942, I was transported to Lwów and imprisoned in the Gestapo prison on Łącki Street. I was caught on suspicion of being a reserve officer participating in the underground. My parents lived in Lwów at Chodorowski Street 11/8. During this period I knew of the following Ukrainians who were collaborating with the Germans: Włodzimierz Antoniak, the owner of the ‘Cytadelanta’ store at Lazarus Street 12; Prof. Jan Babiak, residing at Chodorowski Street 9; and Aleksander Peltiwane, a printer by profession, recently Wachmeister of the Ukrainian police at Ukrainian police station No. 10. I have suspicions that they were the main informers against me, and they made repeated threats to have my parents arrested.
In Lwów I was interrogated several times by the Gestapo on Pełczyńska Street in room 236 (third floor). During the interrogations, I was beaten with a rubber truncheon until I passed out. Jan Dobrzański – a railway locksmith, residing in Lwów, on Gródecka Street, the railway houses, who was also arrested at that time – witnessed my beatings. In 1943, I met him in Flossenbürg in a transport from Majdanek. What happened to him later, I don’t know.
On 3 December 1942, I was transported to Auschwitz. Among others, Józef Piotrowski from Przemyśl, Stanisław Nowakowski from Warsaw, Jan Jost from Lwów, Wiktor Szulc from Lwów, Dr. Nowakowski and his son Stanisław from Lwów rode with me. Of these people, Jost and Dr. Nowakowski are now dead. Jost died in Auschwitz, and Dr. Nowakowski in Mauthausen. There were only a few people in this transport. There was one woman among us named Władysława, the owner of the tenement house at Kurkowa Street 1 in Lwów. Other prisoners joined us in Katowice and on 5 December 1942, at night, we were brought to the camp in Auschwitz. There I received the number 80,688 (the witness shows this number tattooed on his left forearm). I was placed in block 8. The commandant for the execution of sentences was SS-Oberscharführer Palitzsch. He terrorized the entire camp. His surname is known by every Auschwitz prisoner. He personally carried out mass executions of women and men in block no. 11. He killed his victims personally.
Among the prisoners, one particular sadist stands out, Bednarek from Kraków, a block senior in a block for minors. According to my calculations, he killed about 2,000 boys. He did this by beating them with a stick, kicking and so forth. More details about Bednarek can be provided by Juliusz Pasterz, a resident of Przemyśl, Kazimierzowska Street, who was in this block. Another one like Bednarek was Mitas, a former police chief in Katowice, employed in block No. 1 in the punitive unit as a room leader (Auschwitz–Rajsko). From what I was told by some other prisoners, I know that he forced the prisoners to hang from their own belts in the toilet. In the winter, when it was freezing, he stripped the prisoners, put them on stools and soaked them with water, put them on stretchers and covered them with snow.
On Christmas Day 1942, Palitzsch ordered the following punishment: prisoners from the punitive unit were lined up, had to carry sand to the women’s camp using the bottoms of their trench coats—on the double. Kapos and SS men standing at the side beat the prisoners on the way with sticks. This lasted over three hours. There were some fatalities. For example, those who collapsed from exhaustion were pushed into a ditch full of water. When it was over, the dead bodies were pulled out of the water and laid out on the square in the men’s camp, under the Christmas tree. This was done while the orchestra played, and the Germans said that they were Christmas gifts for the Poles.
Palitzsch’s predecessor was Fritsch [Fritzsch], who shortly before my arrival in Auschwitz took over the camp in Flossenbürg.
The oldest crematorium was in Birkenau. However, I was employed for some time during the construction of crematorium II, and so I know how it was fitted. From a distance, I saw transports of people being led to the crematoria, transported there in cars. I was employed in selecting potatoes and [in] other jobs (such as making concrete slabs, inserting fence posts, and so forth).
I was in Auschwitz until 12 March 1943. On this day—I was in block 15 at the time—I was taken to block 22 at night, and from there to the railway station in the city, from which I was transported with a thousand other people to Flossenbürg. This transport was led by Fritzsch himself, [who] came especially for this. There were 50 prisoners and three SS men in each wagon. We traveled for two days and two nights. For the whole way we were given a loaf of bread, 250 g of margarine and 100 g of sausage. We arrived at Flossenbürg on 15 March 1943. Then I saw Fritzsch. He was tall, with gray hair (slightly balding). Nobody died on the way and a thousand people arrived. The camp was located by the forest on a rocky hill. We worked in a quarry. I was placed in barrack 22, then 21. Fritzsch spoke on the first day. He said that we were criminals, but that the German nation is magnanimous, because it does not deprive us of life, but only requires us to work. This speech was translated by the prisoner Stanisław Śmiałek, a former officer.
After three weeks, we were divided into working kommandos: Pferdestahl —cutting into the rock face to make the construction of a horse stable; Transportkolonna —carrying stones in tight columns in march formation; Strassenbau —building a road from the camp to the workplace in the quarries; Kartoffeln —working with potatoes. The work lasted from 6.00 a.m. until 12.00 noon, and then from 1.00 p.m. until 6.00 p.m. or longer. The prisoners from Auschwitz didn’t have holiday breaks or contact with other prisoners. There were also other restrictions: writing letters, leaving the camp etc. were prohibited. Some time around April 1944, 14 prisoners with low numbers, thus having served longer in the camps—such as No. 34, Antek from Warsaw (I don’t know his surname)—reported on the block senior [of barracks] No. 21 and 20 for robbing our food. This block senior took revenge by reporting that these prisoners were stirring up a rebellion. Fritzsch personally meted out 14 lashes of his bullwhip on each of them and sentenced them to work in the quarry for two weeks. After a month, they were punished again with a public flogging on the basis of a sentence that had been read and signed by Himmler.
From then on Fritzsch began a special campaign of torture and harassment. At every opportunity, he would beat someone with his bullwhip, or would order a kapo to do it. He stopped issuing—or rather he ordered the confiscation of—food parcels, resulting in a deterioration in food rations, among other things. Officially he said we weren’t working efficiently enough and for that he was applying these penalties. Often as punishment someone wouldn’t be given lunch, during which time the victim was placed in the square, and before the evening he would get 25 lashes of Fritzsch’s bullwhip. If a prisoner tried to escape from the camp and was caught, he would be placed under a lamp in the square tied up with ropes and chains. An inscription above him would read: ‘I am back.’ After this punishment, he would be placed in the bunker for a few days and later hanged. Hanging had to be done by one of the prisoners in front of everyone else. Other prisoners had to pass in front of the hanging corpse in single file, bareheaded, looking at the corpse. One of Fritzsch’s orders was to go to work in the cold season with a bare head and only wearing a shirt.
On 7 June 1943, I was reported to Fritzsche by kapo Nikel Kircheimer for hiding while working on the boards. I was beaten by Fritzsch then—he gave me five lashes of the bullwhip, and he sentenced me to three weeks of punitive work and from every Saturday to Sunday a hard bed in the bunker.
From 15 March 1943 to 10 June 1943, from among the thousand prisoners from Auschwitz, seven people were shot in front of the crematorium behind the camp, 649 people died of starvation, exhaustion, beatings and diseases (typhus, phlegmon and others), 250 were sent to the camp in Dachau, and 94 were sent to Grafenreuth, nine kilometers from Flossenbürg. From this latter group of people, one person committed suicide, three people were killed during an escape, and 74 died for various reasons. The following, as far as I know, were left alive: Stanisław Śmiałek; Zbigniew Barnaś—deputy staroste from Jasło; Jerzy Różyczka from Jasło; the Gruszków brothers from Sokol; Stanisław Kwiatkowski from Tarnów; Juliusz Pasterz from Przemyśl; Jan Drzewosz from Tomaszów Lubelski, Sokal Street 14; and a priest from Bircza near Przemyśl. I was also in this group in Grafenreut, from where I was taken on 22 December 1943 to Sachsenhausen. Before that, however, I would like to point out that in May 1943, a thousand people from Majdanek arrived in Flossenbürg. 76 people had died on the way. The rest were kept naked for two days in the bathhouse. 12 more people died there. Some died in the following days. In two months 728 people died from this transport, 150 people were sent to Groß-Rosen, and the rest—that is, 34 people—were left in the camp. It was a terrifying transport. The people literally looked like shadows. From this transport, I remember some who survived: Jan Dobrzański from Lwów (I spoke about him above); Bronisław Domaradzki from Lwów, Łazarza Street 10; Jan Drapała—Lwów; Szewczyk and Duda from Warsaw, wrestlers in the French boxing style. Drapała was a Polish army tennis champion, [having served in] the 19th Infantry Regiment for the Defence of Lwów.
The Polish executioners in Flossenbürg were the kapos Nikiel Kircheimer, Otto Amm and Willi Schuhmacher.
In Flossenbürg I received the number 4,380. The above details are based on my own observations and those of my fellow prisoners.
On 22 December 1943, I was deported to Sachsenhausen. There I was given No. 74,597. I went in a transport of 200 people. In this camp, otherwise known as ‘Oranienburg’, there were about 44,000 people of different nationalities and races. Among others, there was the former Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg, and Bandera, but they lived in the so-called Sonderlager and conditions there were good. I was in block 45, where General Roja died. There was a lawyer, Niklewski, and editor Stanisław Baranowski, as well as Count Szembek and Second Lieutenant Antoni Cis from Grodno.
Overall, the conditions there were better than anywhere else. It was a representative camp and can be compared with the Dachau camp. We were allowed to read newspapers. There were radio speakers in the camp and even some sports entertainment. So it was a demonstration camp, at least in its later period, because previously there had been a torture chamber there, particularly in the clinker brick workshop. I was initially employed there as a carpenter and then as a technician in the construction office. In the last days before the capitulation, many people were called up by their surname. It was during the night. These people went missing. News spread that they were shot next to the crematorium. Also people suspected of sabotage, mostly of Russian nationality, were sent to the crematorium. They were marked with black crosses on their cheeks and forehead. Also in the last days, the sick and the weak were taken out of the camp, allegedly to be evacuated, but actually they ended up in the crematorium. I saw this for myself because it was visible from the office where I worked. It is difficult for me to determine how many people were burnt there, but about 3000-4000.
The camp was evacuated at the end of April 1945. We walked west. About 15,000 men and about 3,000 women set out. Whoever collapsed along the way, the SS men would kill. In Neuruppin we came across some cars of the International Red Cross, and they made an agreement with the Germans, and from that moment on they stopped executing us. On 2 May 1945, I escaped from this transport because at that time a lot of people were running away. In the village of Teschendorf near Wittstock, I met the Soviet army, and then headed towards Poland. I came here for Pentecost. On 27 July 1945, I was arrested for unlawfully issuing myself a travel card.
The report was read out.