STANISŁAW ADAMCZEWSKI

Warsaw, 29 April 1946. Investigating Judge Halina Wereńko, delegated to the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having advised the witness of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the significance of the oath, the judge swore the witness in accordance with Art. 109 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

The witness testified as follows:


Name and surname: Stanisław Adamczewski
Names of parents: Konstanty and Józefa née Cholewińska
Date of birth: 15 January 1903
Occupation: caretaker in the municipal governor’s office
Education: seven grades of elementary school
Religious affiliation: Roman Catholic

I was in the house of the Staszic Foundation at Wolska Street 4 when the Warsaw Uprising broke out. I worked as a caretaker in the Central Welfare Council [Rada Główna Opiekuńcza – RGO], which occupied the first floor of the building. A shelter for persons displaced from the Poznań province and from the Pomerania region was located on the second floor. Around one hundred people lived there, mostly elderly men with wives and children. Apart from that, the building contained private flats.

During the first days of the Uprising our house fell into the hands of the insurgents. I don’t remember the exact date, it was probably on 4 or 5 August, after the insurgents had left, that almost all residents went down to a safe shelter in the yard from the side of Okopowa Street.

Henryk Pieczonka and I hid in the basement on the Wolska Street side. On the same day in the afternoon a unit of “Ukrainians” (soldiers in German uniforms, speaking Russian or Ukrainian) burst into the yard. I was able to see from the basement window that they ordered all the men out of the safe shelter. They locked a group of around thirty persons, dragged there out of the safe shelter, in a flat on the ground floor. They kept the women in the safe shelter under lock and key. Then they brought the men out to the yard one by one, they searched them, taking any valuable possessions the men might have, and shot them against a wall. After the execution, the “Ukrainians” scattered around the house, looting the flats. They brought out two more men from the basement and executed them as well.

I do not know the names of the men who were killed.

Then the soldiers left, taking a group of women from the shelter with them. I heard that they were taken to St. Adalbert’s Church in Wola.

A day later, on 6 August 1944, a different group of “Ukrainians” set our house on fire.

A couple of days later yet another group of them found Henryk Pieczonka and took him away. I recognized his body, dumped in the ruins, in 1945 after the liberation.

I don’t remember the date when a group of German soldiers captured me as well. I was added to a group of workers housed at Sokołowska Street. A unit of Verbrennungskommando workers, who were used to burn corpses, was quartered on the second floor of the house we lived in. I heard from them that the bodies of all the persons shot in our yard had been burnt. They also said that a lot of corpses had been burnt in the yard of the house at Wolska Street 4. A large pile of human bodies was burnt in the Staszic Foundation’s garden on a heap of coal which used to be stored there. They said that that the Foundation’s garden had also been used as an execution site to shoot residents of nearby houses from the Karolkowa Street side.

I worked demolishing the barricades. While demolishing a barricade near the Hala Mirowska [trade hall] at the end of August 1944, I saw German soldiers executing two captured insurgents who could have been 15–17 years old.

At this the report was concluded and read out.