JAN SAJNÓG

Warsaw, 12 April 1946. Judge Alicja Germasz, 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 gravity 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 Jan Sajnóg
Names of parents Mikołaj and Albina
Date of birth 28 March 1912
Occupation locksmith
Education vocational school training
Place of residence Warsaw, Gibalskiego Street 1, flat 53
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Criminal record none

During the Warsaw Uprising, while I was fleeing the house where I lived (at Okopowa Street 27), running away from the attacking Germans, I found myself in the house at Przechodnia Street 1.

On 7 August 1944 this house was taken over by Germans. All the residents were ordered to leave the building and to go to a church in Wola. We left with the entire group (men, women and children), without a German escort.

We went down Chłodna Street, then took Żelazna Street to Ogrodowa Street; we went through Karceli Square and to Karolkowa Street. There we found a hole in the wall and we entered the grounds of St Lazarus Hospital. We found ourselves facing a burning building, marked on the diagrammatic drawing with a number 3. Near the building, there were around twenty German gendarmes.

These Germans detained the men from our group (twenty of them), and let the women continue onwards. We were ordered to dig a pit around fifteen meters long and two and a half meters wide, between building no. 3 and the wall.

Not far away, near the wall, in the location marked by the witness on the presented diagrammatic drawing with xxx, there were around one hundred human corpses that were scattered in a disorderly manner. These were bodies of women of various ages, apart from them a few children and two or three men. All of them were in civilian clothes, and almost all of them had gunshot wounds to the backs of their heads.

We were ordered by the gendarmes to bring these corpses into the pit we had dug. We put the bodies in four layers, filling three quarters of the length of the ditch this way; one quarter remaining empty.

After that, one other man from our group (whose name I don’t remember) and I, together with a gendarme, went through the yard of the hospital and from behind building number 4 we brought two human bodies, almost entirely charred. We brought these bodies to the pit we had dug.

Walking through the yard, near building number 5, I saw six charred human bodies. I also saw individual bodies, mostly female, scattered around the entire hospital area.

After we had covered the pit, the gendarmes ordered us to return to Karolkowa Street, from where, with a group of women we met by accident, we were escorted by gendarmes, and later by SS men, to St Adalbert Church in Wola.

Passing by the hospital buildings from the side of Wolska Street, I saw that they had been burnt down.

Later I found myself in the camp in Pruszków, from where I was sent to work in Germany.

I wish to add that the following people were with me in the St Lazarus Hospital grounds: Kazimierz Gawłowski, Zygmunt Kęsko (both residing in Warsaw, Stalowa Street 50, flat 62), Michał Kutrzeba and Ludwik Kowalczyk (both residing in Łódź, Dowborczyków Street 22, flat 15).

The report was read out.