FRANCISZEK KULESZA

On 14 January [194]8 [in] Łódź, [Judge] S. Krzyżanowska [and] Andrzej Janowski, the clerk of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Warsaw [heard as a witness the person specified below]:

Father Franciszek Kulesza, 40 years old; names of parents: Tomasz and Józefa; residing in Łódź, M. Curie-Skłodowskiej Street 22; Roman Catholic priest, currently in a Jesuit monastery; criminal record: none.

After the bombardment and burning down of the cathedral, along with other priests, I took the relics of St. Andrew Bobola and the Miraculous Cross to St. Hyacinth’s Church on Freta Street. There was a hospital in the church itself and in the orphanage, but as for the sanitary staff, I remember only Anna Filipowicz (currently residing in Żoliborz).

The church and the hospital experienced the usual twists and turns of fate: they were bombed, set on fire etc. After the bombardment of the church, it was all organized in the following way: children from the orphanage were put in the basements, and the injured people were lying in the corridor on the ground floor of the orphanage. On Saturday, in the afternoon of 2 September, the Germans and the “Ukrainians” (who constituted the majority) entered our premises.

The Germans were SS men. One of them ripped off my surplice and threatened to kill me, like other priests. Another SS man saved me. Then all the people were ordered out – children, the civilians – and all the injured people, doctors, nurses, and I were to stay. When the civilians left, the “Ukrainians” run amok; they were raping the nurses, they threw grenades into the basements in which there were straw mattresses; many houses on Freta Street were burning then.

At first the sick people were only choking on smoke, screaming for help, but when the straw pile in the yard caught fire and the entire building began to burn, along with the frames of doors and windows on all the floors, I told the nurses – and I began doing so myself – to take out the injured people. We took all eighty of them to Stara Street, where we put them on the rubble. There were eighty sick people in the corridor alone, and apart from these, there were injured people in the room by the corridor, so in total we took out more than a hundred people, but less than one hundred and twenty. We were not taking out the injured from other places. I was taking out the injured from the corridor directly onto Stara Street, not entering the premises of the property, so I could not know what was going on in other places on the premises.

The injured people were lying in the street, and I went to the commander of that area and asked for his permission to transport the injured people to the hospital on the premises of the school near the Warszawa Gdańska Railway Station. The commander’s headquarters was situated in the blocks by the Vistula; the commander was an SS man. He did not want to hear my supplications and told us shortly to go away and go to Wolska Street. When I was standing my ground and trying to change his mind through other Germans, I was warned that he ordered that I should be executed. I managed to flee and get to the hospital in Wola.

Only in Milanówek did I meet one of the injured people from the hospital on Freta Street who had been taken out to Stara Street. That person, whose name I cannot recall today, told me that only after three days a group of people accompanied by Germans and with some priests had come to them, and that all the injured were taken, except for two mortally wounded people who, as that person suspected, were executed by the Germans. Then they were transported to the seminary at Krakowskie Przedmieście Street 64.

I would like to add that three doctors were taken just after the departure of the civilians; the soldiers were saying that they would take them to the commander, to the Kierbedź bridge; six female paramedics fled on their own.

I would like to add that the Germans entered our premises in the afternoon on 1 September, but I no longer remember the day of the week.

The report was read out.