On 25 July 1946 in Chełm, the Municipal Court in Chełm, in the person of Judge Stanisław Urzędowski, with the participation of articled clerk Młaraniewicz, interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having advised the witness of the criminal liability for making false declarations, of the wording of Article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and the significance of the oath, the judge swore the witness in pursuant to Article 111 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, after which the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Antoni Materkowski |
| Age | 47 |
| Parents’ names | Aleksander and Marianna |
| Occupation | secretary of the District National Council |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
I was in Auschwitz from 14 November 1940 to 7 July 1942, as political prisoner no. 6015. Through all that time, the main commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp was Rudolf Höß, a senior SS officer.
On 14 October 1940, I was transported from Lublin to Auschwitz. It was around midnight. We stood by the gate in the camp until morning. In the meantime, the SS man on duty approached the prisoners several times, beat them in the face and kicked them, forcing us to stand. On that day, 14 October 1940, we were deprived of clothes and our hair was shaved. We were given striped clothes and we were marked with numbers. On the same day, Höß’s deputy – Fritzsch, first Lagerführer – told us that we had ceased to be people and we had become numbers, that a number could be replaced by another number, and that the path to our freedom was written over the entrance gate, “Arbeit macht frei” [work sets you free]. At that moment, Gehenna began. We had daily exercises lasting eleven hours a day. The exercises, consisting in drills, squats, dances and other specially selected activities, were supervised by SS men who continued to beat us with whips at random. They took turns when they got tired – every two or three hours. We were asked about our occupation, and if they found out that someone was a policeman, judge or prison guard, they beat them mercilessly. From our transport, the prisoner who was beaten the most was the deputy head of the Chełm prison, Kaczmarek, who died within a month.
On 30 October 1940, one of the prisoners escaped from the camp. As a punishment, we were all forced to stand in the roll-call square for several hours, without any break, in drill clothes, without hats and socks. It rained and snowed all the time. Höß, who had ordered the forced standing, came and supervised us several times. As a result, 160 people were taken from the square straight to the infirmary. Those people died, and others almost died from cold and exhaustion.
After two weeks of training, we went to work. The job consisted in unloading various heavy items and dismantling barracks. We had to do everything swiftly and if someone collapsed from exhaustion, he was beaten and kicked by SS men and Kapos. We worked in cold and hunger for eleven hours a day; we only wore drill clothes. In December, we received caps without visors. While returning from work, exhausted and with no energy, every prisoner had to bring five bricks to the camp – if we did not do it, we were kicked and particularly abused. SS officers and commandant Höß stood at the gate and were pleased to see our misery. One of the SS men always had a German shepherd by his side and he would set the dog on prisoners when he noticed that someone stopped for a moment to have a rest. The dog jumped at the offender and tore him to pieces. As a result, every day we brought from work a dozen or so corpses or dying inmates to the camp. My job was to transport debris, or rather gravel, to the concrete plant. The job was hard: we had to use big shovels to load the cart with rubble, and then several men had to pull the heavy cart to the concrete plant. We pulled a dozen or so carts per day.
In December 1940, I fell ill with pneumonia. A common treatment for this disease consisted in wrapping the sick in freezing cold sheets. After such a treatment, 95 percent of the sick died.
At work, corporal punishments were applied for the smallest violations of the camp regulations. I constantly saw executions that took place in the roll-call square. In the presence of all prisoners, the delinquent was placed on a stool and beaten – he received 25 or 50 lashes. If a prisoner was bleeding and weak after such a punishment, he was taken to the camp and had the wounds disinfected with iodine. Another common punishment was the post. This consisted of hanging a prisoner by his hands for some time. As a result, the hands or tendons broke and the man was unable to move his hands for a few months.
In winter when it was over ten degrees below zero, we took showers in the following way: whole blocks were told to strip naked; we were only allowed to cover ourselves with a blanket or a coat; then we ran 200 meters across the square to the building where the bathhouse was located. There, we waited several minutes in the yard until the previous group left the bathhouse and we went in groups into hot or cold showers. After the shower, we again waited naked for everyone to finish showering and then we formed groups of five and ran to our block.
There was a horrible lice problem in the camp. Therefore, every day after 11 hours of work, we had to search for that vermin. Then, our clothes were inspected. If someone was caught having lice, he was sent naked to the bathhouse to sleep on the concrete floor, while his clothes were being disinfected. He was also drenched with some stinging liquid and he had to wait there naked all night – in the morning he went to work. There was also an outbreak of scabies. We were given a stinky black ointment, which we put on our bodies, and we went to work in clothes soaked in it. When it was cold, the clothes would freeze, but it did not matter.
Each prisoner was allowed to send a letter to his family every two weeks. We were not given any paper. We could buy some paper with an envelope and a stamp for a daily portion of bread. The content of the letters was strictly predetermined: if a prisoner provided information that seemed inappropriate to the censors, he was punished with an hour on the post, received 25 or 50 lashes or was transferred to the penal unit. Families who wrote forbidden things to prisoners were at risk of being investigated. Executions of civilians who were brought to the camp, but were not prisoners, were very frequent. Several dozen people were brought in and executed by firing squad in pits left after digging gravel, situated about 150 meters from the camp – afterwards, when we went to work to pick up gravel, we saw traces of blood. The dead were transported by carts to the crematorium. There were blood marks on the road.
Several times a week before work, a list of prisoners who were not supposed to go to work that day was read out. There were always about 40 people on the list. We knew that more or less 35 from among those whose names were read would be killed on that same day. The rest were sent to the penal unit. Executions took place about 10.00 a.m. in block 11, by the so-called wall of death. Initially, prisoners were shot dead by an SS honorary division. Then, such death was considered to be too honorable for prisoners and it was changed. Inmates destined for death were gathered in one room and taken to the “wall of death” one by one. While two prisoners were holding the convict by his hands, an SS man approached and shot him in the back of the head from a distance of half a meter. When the next convict was brought in, there were still traces of blood remaining from the previous execution.
I would like to describe one event. In the camp, I met a mortgage clerk from Chełm called Ziemski, along with his 15-year-old son and his son-in-law. He told me that he had been imprisoned for the distribution of newspapers. The following day while I was carrying gravel, I saw them in the penal unit. I saw Ziemski after two weeks: he was leaning on a shovel for tossing gravel – he was unresponsive and did not react when I bowed, because he no longer recognized me. His son was rubbing his back. On the following day, the son told me his father had died. After another two weeks, Ziemski’s son died of pneumonia.
Being sent to the penal unit meant cruel death. That unit was treated in an extremely bestial manner. Those prisoners performed the hardest work, were deprived of the right to write to their families, and if other inmates somehow tried to help them or to communicate with them, they were at risk of being placed in the penal unit themselves. Almost all Jews in the camp were transferred to the penal unit, as well as Poles who had been sentenced by the Gestapo or had violated camp rules.
Once, I accidentally witnessed the following incident: the helper of a Kapo was beating a prisoner from the penal unit, a Jew. When the Jew collapsed, his oppressor stepped on his throat and continued to torture him, finally covering him with dirt. In the meantime, some SS men were watching that scene with a sense of satisfaction and triumph. There were countless scenes of this kind.
Our camp was surrounded by barbed wire. There were three lines of wires. The last one was electrified. Every several meters, there were watchtowers, where SS men armed with machine guns performed their duty. They shot at anyone who crossed even the first line of the wires without a warning. I saw dozens of such incidents myself. Prisoners who had had enough of the tortures and abuse sometimes ended their misery by crossing the line of wires and getting killed, or, if it took place at night and they managed to pass the first two lines without being noticed, they were electrocuted to death. I myself often saw dead bodies hanging on the wires. Höß knew about it and gave such orders.
Initially, that is from the beginning of 1940 until the middle of 1941, for the escape of one prisoner, 20 inmates were selected from his block or, if the escape happened at work outside the camp, from the detail in which he was employed. The selected inmates were taken to block 11 and placed in underground bunkers, where they died after a few days. I experienced such selections over a dozen times. Höß was often present and observed it from a distance, while his deputy was selecting the unfortunate inmates. In the middle of 1941, such punishment was abolished, and another one was introduced – if a prisoner escaped, members of his immediate family were brought to the camp. I know that once the elderly mother of an escapee was detained.
Two dead bodies were placed into one wooden coffin made of white boards, and four or six prisoners carried the corpses out of the camp to the nearby crematorium. The coffins were placed at the camp’s gate, where an SS man on duty examined the bodies with a bayonet to make sure that they were really dead. He stabbed with the bayonet in the chest or stomach – depending on his current mood. He also wrote down the number of the deceased to determine how many people would be missing from the camp.
In the camp, there was an enormous outbreak of a disease that in German was called Durchfall. The affected person would defecate everything they ate without having digested it. The sick would die within a few days unless they tried to cure themselves on their own. Typhus was also widespread. These two diseases were responsible for the death of about 30 percent of the prisoners.
In January or February 1941, it was announced that handicapped people were allowed to sign up for light work. A number of people came forward and in July 1941 they were transported out of the camp but – as it turned out later– not to work but to be exterminated. The following fact confirms this. A friend of mine, Mikołaj Gordziejczyk, had also signed up. Since I was curious about what had happened to him, I wrote three letters to my wife, asking if she had heard from Gordziejczy’s family about how he was doing. At first, my wife did not respond to that question and then in a third letter she wrote that some paragraphs had been removed from my letters. So I wrote to her again, but I slightly modified Gordziejczyk’s name. My wife wrote me back that Gordziejczyk’s family had been notified of his death in July 1941, that is, at the time when he was transported out of the camp to do light jobs.
In the camp, there was a special block for patients suffering from lung problems. From time to time, seriously ill patients from that block were selected and taken to the gas chambers.
In April, 1,800 people were brought in from Lublin and the whole transport was sent to Dwory, where a factory was being built. Then, Höß arrived and said, “Take advantage of these people’s energy, because it is a transport which is strong and able to work.” Almost all people from that transport died, either of excessive work or diseases, and some of them in mass executions, which were organized every few weeks. At a reunion of political prisoners in Lublin, I met a man from that transport. People were killed there at any opportunity. There were also boys aged 13 to 18 among them – they were not taken to work but throughout the winter of 1940 they had to stand in the square for 11 hours, so their number drastically dropped; they died of cold and hunger. In the middle of 1941, there was only a small group of them left. Those boys were students, all Polish, mostly from the intelligentsia – not many of them were sons of workers and farmers.
After work, we were beaten and persecuted in the camp by block seniors and room orderlies, so we were all frightened all the time.
At the beginning of 1942, a transport of Russian prisoners of war, consisting of 11,000 people, was brought to the camp. Two months later, about a hundred people from that transport were left. The transport was exterminated by beating, tormenting, starving and murdering – without a break and for no particular reason.
In 1942, Jews from all over Europe were brought to Auschwitz. They were not brought into the camp, but were immediately exterminated in the crematorium. I saw huge piles of men’s, women’s and children’s clothes, and prams – all that was left of the masses of murdered Jews.
There were a number of transports consisting of Soviet prisoners of war, but they too were not placed in the camp, but immediately sent to the gas chambers. Afterwards, we only saw their clothes.
On 15 January 1942, I was caught lighting a piece of a cigarette butt while I was working five or six kilometers away from the camp, removing snowdrifts. I was punished with five nights in the bunker. That punishment consisted in locking seven people in a basement, in a cell 90 cm long and 80 cm wide, for a whole night, for 12 hours. There was not enough space to put both feet on the ground, the air inlet was small and the inside was terribly stuffy. Having spent a night in such conditions, we went to work in the freezing cold for 11 hours – five days in a row. Then, the punishment continued: I was not allowed to smoke cigarettes for six weeks, and this was strictly observed, because during that period I was searched twice a day. As a result of that punishment in the bunker and of excessive work in terrible conditions, I contracted pneumonia once again. Consequently, I fell sick with tuberculosis and I have suffered from that disease to this day. Rudolf Höß gave the order to apply such punishments.
In 1942, a women’s work unit was formed in Auschwitz. The female prisoners, regardless of their strength and age, worked while poorly dressed, often barefoot, and were supervised by SS women – prostitutes with dogs.
When I was in the camp, the main tormentors and camp leaders were: commandant Rudolf Höß, first Lagerführer Fritzsch, second Lagerführer Seidler, Arbeitsdienstführer Schwarz, head of the Political Department Grabner and Rapportführer Palitzsch − these were the people who were the most responsible for our misery. For attempting to smoke a cigarette, I was sent to the bunker by Unterscharführer Stolten, the Kommandoführer of Buna, a synthetic rubber factory. Schwarz personally selected me for transport to the quarries in Mauthausen-Gusen.
In 1942, Silesians who had taken part in the Silesian uprising, as well as younger ones who did not want to sign up as Volksdeutsches, were brought to the camp and murdered. For the whole time, we were not allowed to receive parcels. I received one package for Christmas 1940; it weighed a kilogram. Until 1942, we were allowed to receive 40 marks per month, and from 1942 sending money was prohibited due to foreign currency restrictions. When I was leaving Auschwitz for Mauthausen-Gusen, I had only five marks.