Warsaw, 4 November 194[6]. Adam Tokarz, acting as a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, heard the person named below as a witness. The witness testified as follows:
My name is Stanisława Taranowa, born on 3 March 1896.
To complete the testimony I made on 8 February 1946 before the acting investigating judge, I testify as follows:
As I watched the events from the building of the school at Marii Kazimiery Street 21 on 14 September 1944, I saw the soldiers join a dozen people forced out of the house at Marii Kazimiery Street 19 (and not, as wrongly recorded, 21) to the few people forced out of the school. Later I saw that not all the people from that group were killed, as a large number of them managed to flee through the gardens in the direction of Żoliborz, although – as far as I know – the majority found themselves under fire again between Rymkiewicza Street and the former Gas School, as a result of which most were killed. A number of people were killed on Marii Kazimiery Street, when tyring to resist walking down the burning street and in the first phase of their flight, as far as I can tell. There were three corpses on the street and also supposedly corpses in the gardens. The bodies lying in the street were soon crushed by an advancing tank. A moment after the attempted escape and the shooting that ensued, two women with a child in a stroller, who wanted to go to Żoliborz, came out of the school at number 21. They were noticed by the soldiers and shot, having abandoned the stroller with the child inside. The child was executed immediately afterwards. As for the execution in front of the house at Dembińskiego Street 2/4, as I was hiding in a nearby shelter on the premises of Marii Kazimiery Street 23, I saw and heard that Father Hieronim Brzozowski left the house he was in with other civilians holding a monstrance and saying something in German to the soldiers who put him aside and stopped shooting after some time. They then took [the priest] and the rest of the people in the direction of the ponds. Later, when I was in the school building, I saw that the priest, without a monstrance this time, was led by the soldiers again down Dembińskiego Street. The corpse of the priest was later found at the end of Dembińskiego Street.
In the evening, Lucjan Kowalski, with burns, came running to the school and told us that he had run away from the shelter at Dembińskiego Street 15 into which grenades had been thrown and which was subsequently set on fire. There were some ten people in the shelter and it seems that no one survived. Kowalski himself was also killed. The names of the people who were with him in the shelter can be found in the Polish Red Cross exhumation report no. 1515, which was read out to me. When on 20 September, called to do so by a soldier, we left the shelter at Marii Kazimiery Street 29, we were directed first to Dembińskiego Street, and then down Marii Kazimiery Street, and I saw [then] a large number of corpses lying in front of the Rogalskis’ house, on Dembińskiego Street, Marii Kazimiery Street and in the gardens, as well as further in the direction of Bielany in Wolański’s gardens. There were hundreds of corpses.
When I came back to Marymont in 1945, I was present during the exhumations carried out by the Polish Red Cross. I took part in identifying the victims and remember that the number of identified victims was 220 and that there were over 300 unidentified corpses. Juxtaposing my own observations with the lists of people in the exhumation reports of the Polish Red Cross which were presented to me, I claim that the number in the reports does not equal the number of uncovered graves and that there are cases of persons from one grave being recorded in several reports, so particular reports cannot be taken to represent particular executions or even particular graves.
At that the report was concluded and read out.