On 1 October 1946, in Zakopane, in the Magistrates’ Court in Zakopane, Third Criminal Division, Judge M. Fałek, with the participation of court clerk, apprentice K. Piwowarczyk, heard the person mentioned below as a witness without oath. After being informed of the criminal liability for giving false testimony and about the content of art. 107 of the Criminal Code, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Władysław Tondos |
| Age | 46 |
| Parents’ names | Franciszek and Julianna |
| Place of residence | Zakopane – Sanatorium [of the Polish] Red Cross |
| Occupation | Doctor |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none for perjury |
| Relation to the parties | none |
I was arrested by the Gestapo in Zakopane in May 1941. By July of that year I already found myself in the concentration camp in Auschwitz. I stayed there until 25 August 1944. Being a doctor, I was assigned to perform the duties of a nurse, because I couldn’t officially work as a doctor. My duties included nursing sick prisoners in the hospital, as well as providing them with medical assistance. I would like to emphasize that my duties also included scrubbing the floor, removing rubbish, etc.
In principle, you couldn’t be ill for more than six weeks, for after that the prisoner was killed with a phenol injection. It was done like this: the German doctor or the (paramedic)—and these were Dr. Jung, a member of the SS, an extremely ruthless individual, and Dr. Entress, who had finished medical school in Poznan, a man who didn’t allow direct acts of brutality against individuals, such as beating or kicking, and yet was a cold cynic who sent hundreds of people every day to be injected with phenol without even blinking an eye. There was a third doctor—a German whose surname I don’t remember. Anyone [who] was there at whatever time, or [also] paramedic Kler [Klehr] (a shoemaker by profession), chose a certain number of people from the hospital every week, an average of a few hundred people from the entire hospital, and ordered their murder by phenol injection. For this purpose, they delegated an appropriate number of injections to be carried out by fellow prisoners, including a certain Stoś and Pańszczyk from Kraków, who were all too eager to carry out the orders entrusted to them, and at first they used to inject intravenously, but then they stopped messing around and stuck it straight into the heart. [The injections] were also done by the above-mentioned paramedic Klehr. I should add that he carried out acts of brutality such as this: if someone who was about to receive a phenol injection tried to defend himself, Klehr would beat him on his shins with an iron bar until he calmed down.
In 1942 and 1943, the phenol killings increased in scale, namely, every day the German doctor would refer several hundred sick prisoners to the dispensary, where they were stripped naked, and then the German doctor would segregate them and allocate several hundred to be killed by phenol. This could be up to 700 a day. The German camp authorities tried to keep the mass murder of prisoners by phenol a secret, which you could tell by the fact that for the purposes of removing the corpses of those killed in this way, they would order a so-called Lagerspere, during which the prisoners were not allowed to leave their barracks. The corpses were transported to the crematorium.
First I stayed in block 28, then 19, and I was also almost three months in the so-called quarantine in block 11, destined for deportation to Majdanek, which I avoided due to pneumonia. I ended up in block 20, as a regular doctor, and later in 1944 as the block’s head doctor.
Since the publicity generated by the killing of prisoners by phenol wasn’t in the Germans’ best interests, by the autumn of 1941 tests were underway to kill prisoners with gas. However, at the beginning this was done in the bunkers of block 11. Around 500 sick prisoners were asphyxiated, selected from the hospital by a German doctor, Dr. Jung, along with over 600 Soviet prisoners of war. Together with 30 other prisoners I took part – because I had no choice – in taking out the already rotting corpses of the gassed prisoners and putting them on wagons, which we then had to pull to the crematorium ourselves, this at the time being still located beyond the wire.
Then in 1942 [and] also in 1943 this method of murdering the prisoners was applied to patients selected from hospital blocks [and] also to prisoners chosen from outside the hospital, in the camp during roll calls by any one of the Germans—that is, by an SS caretaker. [This happened] if a prisoner was found to have a leg injury, or even a small swelling of the thighs. These were usually hunger pains.
From 1942, large transports of Jews began to come in, who were murdered en masse by using gas—often up to 20,000 in one day. The Germans met the arrivals of such transports of Jews at the camp in a cynical manner. More often than not they were met by the camp manager, who was Fritsch [Fritzsch], then Aumayer [Aumeier], or sometimes even Rudolf Höß himself. He welcomed the Jews, assuring them that they would be fine in the camp, if they worked well, that they would get good clothes, etc. Then he would ask the sick to come forward and the doctors to come so that the sick could be taken care of, but the doctors would take care of them by loading them into cars. In addition, between two and five percent of the Jews (men and women), who were healthy and strong, were selected and sent to the camp as normal prisoners. The sick Jews were taken immediately from where they had been loaded onto cars and driven directly to the gas chambers. I learned about all this from the small number of Jewish prisoners who had been chosen to stay in the camp. [I learned from them] how it all happened at the station when the Jewish transports arrived. That these huge numbers of Jews were murdered by means of gas I learned from Jewish prisoners from a special kommando, who dealt exclusively with the removal of dead bodies and burning them in crematoria, as well as from drunken SS chauffeurs.
I should note that the above-mentioned kommando consisted of about 300 people, killed every three months by means of gas, and then replaced by 300 freshly selected Jews. Five modern crematoria in the end couldn’t accommodate the huge number of human bodies, so the corpses of the prisoners had to be burned on pyres or even in huge pits. [Besides this] the bodies were buried ad hoc. About half a year later, the prisoners had to dig up these pits and burn the remains in the crematoria.
In 1942, a huge epidemic of typhus broke out in the camp. At first, the Germans didn’t react, but when the German doctor Dr. Schwel died and several other SS men began to get sick, the camp was disinfected (delousing). The sick and the convalescents from the typhus block (about 1500 people) were loaded onto cars and gassed in the chambers. I should add that when it came to the Jews, if anyone fell ill in a kommando, there were cases where he would be brought to the hospital for examination, and then, despite being supervised, we were sometimes able to communicate with such a prisoner and he told us about the huge number of Jews being gassed, [as well as] Poles, and deportees from the Lublin and Zamość region.
I remember that in 1943, two groups of 80 boys aged 12 to 16 years were brought from Birkenau to the block where I was; they looked well, properly nourished, of peasant origin, and there they were injected with phenol. One of these boys said to me, ‘I know why they’re doing it—they want to take over our good land’. They were boys from the Lublin and Zamość area.
In addition to the aforementioned methods of murdering, people were also shot, at first by a firing squad, and then en masse with a shot to the back of the head. This was most often performed by SS man Palitzsch. I witnessed all of this from Block 20, which was almost opposite block 11, and observed Commandant Höß accompanied by German civilians and military personnel, camp guests specially invited to executions, leaving the courtyard of block 20, where the execution had been carried out. Among them, I also saw some women.
I didn’t see much of Rudolf Höß. However, all the directives regarding the hardships and murders in the camp came from him. Rudolf Höß was even more zealous, I suppose, than required by the orders he had been given from Berlin, and I conclude this from the fact that, when in the autumn of 1941, about 600 sick prisoners were gassed, they were not removed immediately from the camp statistics, but in increments of around 100 per day.
At the beginning of 1944, the camp’s commandant was changed for four months, and Liebehenschel took over. This German changed the camp completely. The prisoners’ living conditions improved radically. The punishment bunkers and public beatings were suspended, because this kind of torture had been meted out for smoking a cigarette at work, for example, or if a prisoner was caught eating at work, even if it was a crumb of bread or a raw potato. It was forbidden for kapos to beat prisoners during and after work, and the punitive unit was dissolved. There were, however, incidents—even though the SS men generally followed the orders of the commandant—where one of the SS men would beat up a prisoner. At that point, one prisoner named Józef Cyrankiewicz—today he’s the general secretary of the PPS, deputy to the National Council—went to Commandant Liebehenschel and informed him of such incidents. Not only did Cyrankiewicz not suffer any repercussions for this, but Liebehenschel allowed him to stay in a hospital block even though he was healthy. I should add that if this had happened on Rudolf Höß’s watch, then any prisoner who dared come forward to him with a complaint would have surely been tortured to death in the worst possible way.
It happened sometimes that prisoners escaped from the camp, but if such a prisoner was caught during the Rudolf Höß era, he would have been beaten publicly and then he would have to walk around with a plaque bearing the German inscription ‚Ich bin wieder da’ [I’m back], and then he would be placed in the bunker, never to leave. On the other hand, during Liebehenschel period, if an escapee was caught and brought back, he wasn’t subject to any punishment and remained in the camp. When Rudolf Höß returned, the prisoners’ conditions immediately deteriorated considerably. The beatings [and] the bunkers came back. In August 1944, I was taken to the bunker myself along with 64 other prisoners, allegedly on the charge that we were creating an organization [planning] to kill the Germans. As the front approached ever closer, we were sentenced to death. However, Berlin didn’t agree so we avoided this.
The bunkers were of various kinds. Made from concrete, they served as a punishment for any kind of offense, for example for smoking a cigarette at work. The first type of bunkers were standing bunkers, where as many people as possible were crammed and then locked in for the night. During the day they were taken out to work as normal. The punishments of this type usually lasted two weeks. The bunker was poorly ventilated, and once in the winter, snow covered up the small hole at the top of the bunker and 18 men were asphyxiated. There were also bunkers that were flooded with water, and some where the prisoners had to lie on the stone floor.
On 25 August 1944, I was deported from Auschwitz to Bremen, where I worked in an aircraft factory, and after six weeks, after this factory was bombed, the rest of the prisoners who hadn’t been killed—because the prisoners were not allowed to seek protection in the bunkers—were transported to Neuengamme, then to Wilhelmshaven, and from there to Hamburg, until finally I was liberated by the English near Sandbostel.