Warsaw, 10 May 1949. A member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Norbert Szuman (MA), interviewed the person named below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Anna Kępczyńska, née Wieczorek |
| Date and place of birth | 27 April 1919 in Warsaw |
| Parents’ names | Antoni and Julia, née Wilczak |
| Father’s occupation | prison warden |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Education | intermediate school leaving exam |
| Occupation | housewife |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Puławska Street 11, flat 10 |
| Criminal record | none |
When the Warsaw Uprising broke out, I was in my flat at Puławska Street 11. Already on 1 August 1944 at 7.30 p.m. the first Germans barged into the courtyard of our house and ordered all of the residents who were downstairs to go beneath no. 17 Puławska Street. Not everyone left. I, however, came down, and therefore had to go down into no. 17. We sat there together with the residents of the house at no. 17 and the populace that had accidentally found itself on the premises of that house for five days, in flats that had previously belonged to Germans and Jews. We had nothing to eat, only water. Only on the first day did the residents of the house at no. 17 give us some food. On 5 August at noon, Germans started banging on the gate (the gate was closed). The caretaker who opened the gate was shot dead on the spot. The Germans barged into individual flats and threw everybody out into the courtyard. I heard that in one of the flats they killed a sick man and wounded his caregiver. In the courtyard the Germans ordered the women to stand aside from the men. The men were led to the barracks at Rakowiecka Street, on the corner with Puławska Street. The women from our house, myself among them, approached an officer and asked him to take us to our house at Puławska Street 11. Escorted by German soldiers, we managed to get back to our house.
Around 4.00 p.m. on the same day (5 August) Germans burst into our courtyard. They shouted: Deutsche raus!, after which within a few minutes, having first checked their documents, they let all of the Germans living in our house out into the street and closed the gate. They threw grenades and bottles containing some sort of liquid onto the left annex of our house, which caught fire immediately. A great many people were standing in the courtyard. Seeing the burning house, some of them hid in the annexes that were still free of flames, or in basements, while others remained in the courtyard. The Germans started firing at the latter. I stood behind a German who was shooting. I saw a whole family made up of five people (including a 5-year-old girl) standing in the burning annex, right next to the staircase window, with two other men alongside. When the Germans saw them, they opened fire, wounding or killing everyone in the group. Their bodies, together with the crumbling stairs, fell down. When I saw how the Germans had treated them, I quietly withdrew to our flat in the right annex. From the window of my flat on the first floor I saw how a German pushed two old ladies, aged around 60, from Puławska Street into the gate; they were the cousins of our landlord, a German by the surname of Werner, who did not possess German identity cards. The German kicked them, and then shot them dead. I ran down to the basement under the right annex. Together with my sister, Natalia Sikorska, with whom I was inseparable from the very beginning, I spent the entire night in the basement. In the morning we could hear that there was also somebody else in the basement. Suddenly, we smelled acrid smoke. When breathing, we felt a terrible pain in our lungs and stomach. Our entire throats were scalded. We guessed that the Germans must have used gas. Covering our mouths with wet towels and sand, which we had a supply of in the basement, we waited until the German went away. We ran out into the courtyard. The Germans were no longer there. In the courtyard, near the well, we saw the bodies of the two elderly women who had been killed by the Germans. I did not see any more bodies in the courtyard at the time. We were pulled in through the ground floor window of the central annex, the only one that was not ablaze (the front and right annexes were by now burning fiercely), by two women. Together, we all ran down into the basement. These women told us that the Germans were on the fourth floor of the central annex, where they were pillaging the flats. We were sitting in one of the basements when we heard the Germans walking along the corridor and opening the doors to every basement. However, they did not look into ours. When they had left the basements, we came out of our hiding place – only to find that every basement had been doused in benzol. Some time later we saw the Germans throw a burning firebrand into one of the basements. We managed to extinguish it using sand. In the meantime, the house was blazing. During the night of that day (6 August) I looked out from our hiding place in order to determine whether it was day or night, for there was no window in the shelter in which we were hiding. At this moment the house collapsed, covering my feet in debris and completely blocking the exit from our hiding place. Pulling out bricks from the debris, we made ourselves a new opening and thus managed to get out into the corridor. By now, everything around us was on fire. Scalded by the hot water pouring out of the burst pipes and burnt by the fire, we forced our way through – without any clothes (for they had caught fire and we had had to remove them) – to a shelter in the debris on the other side of the central annex. There we remained, but only three of us (the aunt and mother of our neighbor, Halina Nagot, who had initially shared the hiding place with us, soon found it impossible to remain in the stuffy basement and left), until 16 August, for the Germans – having seen that there were some living people in the shelter – had covered up the passage. During this period the fire died down somewhat, thus creating a new exit. On 16 August the Germans set a ladder to our hiding place. Hearing this, we withdrew to our initial hideout. We were found there on the same day by the Germans, who were accompanied by Volksdeutscher – busy pillaging the houses. They gave us some clothes. Together with the people from neighboring streets, we went out into Rakowiecka Street and proceeded towards Okęcie. From there I took the narrow-gauge train to Milanówek.
At this point the report was concluded and read out.