Presiding Judge: Please call witness Seweryna Szmaglewska to the stand.
Witness: Seweryna Szmaglewska, 30 years old, writer, Roman Catholic, no relationship to the defendants.
Presiding Judge: I advise the witness to speak the truth. Making false declarations is punishable with a prison term of up to five years. Are there any requests regarding the mode of hearing of the witness?
Prosecution: No.
Defense: No.
Presiding Judge: The witness shall testify without taking the oath. Will the witness please state when she stayed in the camp and what specific facts she can provide from her own experience? What can the witness say about the living conditions in Auschwitz?
Witness: I came to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. I usually worked outside the camp, doing different jobs, so I noticed a lot of things. Already in 1942, I witnessed a high intensification of typhus, malaria and dysentery epidemics, and the little white house where they initially gassed prisoners, before the crematoria were opened. In the following years, I observed the development of the camp, and how the methods of exterminating prisoners were elaborated and improved. During my whole stay, I noticed that the personnel had a very detailed system in place for exterminating people. The longer I stayed in the camp and witnessed the implementation of that system, the more carefully designed and evil it seemed to me. It consisted in crushing the dignity of people, undermining their mental strength, making them lose their faith in justice and humanity, as well as in weakening their physical strength by spreading epidemics, exhausting their bodies, only to kill them at the end. The system made it clearly possible for the SS men to murder prisoners in the camp without even laying a hand on them.
Defendant Mandl, later the camp commandant, who is present here today, did not even have to commit those acts of abuse towards prisoners, which she nevertheless perpetrated, because she could have just limited herself to what she did most often, namely escorting people to the crematoria. Many members of the camp personnel, both men and women, acted from a distance, so prisoners could not always directly see the Germans who performed specific functions in the camp. For a long time, for many prisoners even during their whole stay in the camp, the German personnel seemed only a sinister legend. They never met them face to face, but those forces, invisible to the prisoners at close distance, were nevertheless operating.
I remember that when I came to the camp in 1942, I was placed in barrack 1, which was the first women’s barrack in Birkenau. From the first moment of my stay, I witnessed unprecedented cruelty. The very first night, someone screaming from above woke me up, “Be careful, because the woman laying here has a severe case of dysentery, so her feces can leak down”. On that same day during the roll call, a number of women were laying in the rain and mud, including writer Zahorska, who was dying. I do not remember other names.
I saw prisoners being beaten and abused, I saw women carrying rails they could barely lift on their shoulders, but I did not see any SS men at first. They acted from a distance, through the prisoners who had become their tools. By entering the camp, every prisoner stepped into the middle of an epidemic, which was being spread by the German SS members of the camp personnel. Women arrived at the camp clean, often straight from their houses, sometimes from prisons. They were immediately shaved, deprived of clothes, and given shirts crawling with lice and nits, which just a few days before had belonged to women dying of typhus. In this way in a very short time, every transport contracted typhus fever. The German personnel did not have to contribute to the death of those prisoners directly, because they died anyway within a very short period of time.
I would like to draw your attention to a certain inconsistency in the behavior of the camp personnel. People in crematoria were exterminated with the use of a gas called Zyklon, which proved entirely sufficient for murdering millions of people in a short time. The same gas was used for disinfection purposes. Defendant Brandl specialized in disinfecting clothes in the camp. In this case, the Zyklon gas was not enough to kill lice and nits, because the camp personnel wanted the epidemic to be one of the quick methods of annihilating prisoners in the camp.
I would like to recall how the camp personnel pretended that they paid attention to cleanliness. What I am going to say is not very pleasant, but not everything, or rather very few things were pleasant in the camp. It was a custom in the barracks that prisoners returning from work were given red bowls with food. Immediately after the meal, we had to return the bowls, leave them in the middle of the block, and go back to our bed. The floor in the barracks was covered in deep mud, so sick women with swollen legs and those who had just recovered from typhus were sometimes unable, especially at night, to go to the toilets, which were situated far away. I know that they were often dying and not fully aware of their actions. People who have stayed in the camp would not be surprised that those women often searched garbage bins looking for a bowl or a dish brought by the newly arrived transport, and used those dishes when suffering from a bladder disease or a severe case of dysentery. Instead of spending the whole night near or in the toilet, they kept the bowl and used it. However, prisoners were always searched at the gate – an activity that Mandl performed with pleasure – and everything they had on them was taken away, including the bowls, which were then thrown into a ditch. They stayed there for some time, and were then collected by women tidying up the camp who threw them into feces in the toilets, where they again stayed for a while. When a new transport arrived, women were given those bowls, not thoroughly washed with water, because water was scarce in the camp, and we ate from those bowls again. Just as the improperly disinfected shirts were a hotbed for typhoid fever, the dishes infected with dysentery spread the disease.
Not only the women who fell sick died, but also those who were lucky to survive the epidemic. Unfortunately, they were let out of the hospital blocks with slightly raised or high temperature, with swollen legs, and poorly dressed. They were immediately sent to do hard work, sometimes far away from the camp. I remember one day when I left the hospital barrack with such a group. We could barely stand on our feet. Many of us were walking bent in half. Some women were mentally impaired, having suffered from a severe case of typhoid. We were all lightly dressed, but they put us in a group of people leaving for work to Budy, which was 11 kilometers away from the camp. It was December. The work was really hard to endure. I remember that one woman was heavily pregnant, which was already noticeable. With the help of an interpreter, she asked a German who had escorted us to work to let her have a rest, but he just laughed at her, hit her in the stomach with the gun butt a few times, and pushed her back to work.
In this way, columns of prisoners returning from work would always carry a few women who had passed out. The Germans finished them off on their way back, and not only the women who were unable to walk, but also those who carried them – women returning from work, who had survived a severe illness. It was just another way to annihilate and exterminate the prisoners. Now it is difficult to say what caused more harm to people and what came first: destruction of the body or mental and moral destruction. In addition to cases of unparalleled heroism, we also witnessed cases of the crushing of human dignity and the eradication of the most humane traits in people. I remember one event that took place in 1944. So many people were then being transported to the crematorium and the process was so apparent that there was no prisoner in the camp who was not aware of what was going on at the ramp. At that time, I worked inside a barrack called Unterkunft. It was a warehouse, where quilts and blankets for the prisoners were stored. It was the closest barrack to the wire. The ramp was situated behind it, close to the crematorium and in front of the place where selections of prisoners took place. Looking through the barrack’s upper windows, one could perfectly see the camp’s kommando and defendant Mandl sorting people into those who were destined for imminent death in the crematorium and those who were to go to the camp and have a faint hope that they would save their lives.
Everybody in the camp knew that young women were the most likely to get into the camp. We also knew that young women with babies in their hands or arriving with their children had to go straight to the crematorium, together with the children. At that time, there was a barrack, where the camp authorities kept Jewish women who had given birth in the camp. One day, they were informed that they would be subjected to a selection. They were so terrified with what they had seen behind the wire and deeply convinced that with the babies they would not be able to save themselves that they left the children in the barrack and escaped. There was a lot of chaos in the camp, so they managed to save themselves. They had been deprived of the strongest instincts which nature gave to women: the maternal instinct. The babies cried for a few days, and compassionate women brought them water, because there was nothing else. We knew that sooner or later the children would die. And they slowly died, because the camp personnel were busy with different things at the ramp.
It was just one of the events we witnessed day after day.
In this perspective, the intention of the defendants to exonerate themselves, which I have followed till today in the newspapers, for example that Mandl did not carry a gun, or that someone did not hit a given prisoner, or did not kill anyone, is a naïve line of defense and does not withstand the scrutiny of the prisoners. We knew and we know that each of the defendants is responsible for the enormous number of people who died in Auschwitz. The maximum punishment for the defendants will be the highest expression of mercy. Their death would never compensate for the death of the people who stayed there. The daily toll in some of the hospital barracks would sometimes exceed the number of people sitting in the dock right now. Those who died in Auschwitz were the best and the bravest people in Europe, because they were usually those who had voluntarily entered the underground fight against fascism. Their death will not be redeemed by any verdict. They were usually accompanied by children and elderly people, cripples, and sick women. To illustrate the thoughtlessness and bestial cruelty of the camp personnel, I can provide a small example, which I remember from the beginning of my stay.
There was a crippled woman whose right hand was paralyzed. It so happened that she often worked by my side. She spoke German quite well and tried to explain that she was not able to use a spade, because she could not hold it in one hand. I assume that she died in the first months, because I did not see her in the camp in 1943.
I would like to say a few words about the situation of all children who were sent to the camp. They represented the most vulnerable group. They were as poorly dressed as every other prisoner, as hungry and as exposed to diseases as the adults. But they were more unhappy than us, because they were unable to create for themselves, like we did, an abstract source of strength. Jewish children were sent straight to the crematorium. In the long months of 1944 and the previous years, I lived and worked close to the crematorium, so I saw lots of people go to the gas chambers. It seems to me that it does not matter whether the defendants hit prisoners with a hand or a whip, or whether they just carried out their duties, executing someone else’s orders. They are equally responsible. In winter 1943/44, that is in the period of the second epidemics, I was able to visit the hospital barrack a few times. Just like every other prisoner, I wanted to stay emotionally balanced, so I avoided every barrack with piles of dead people lying around it. However, I stopped in front of one of the barracks and I thought that it was my duty as a human being to look at those who were here with me, who had died on that day, and who soon would be burnt in the crematorium. I looked at the emaciated bodies, covered in bruises and ulcers, eaten by lice. I looked at the mouths opened with their last scream and at their blurry, open eyes. I thought with sadness that what the Germans had done was a disgrace to the whole century, that the humanity had never perpetrated such a colossal crime. A few months ago, I went to Auschwitz to see how the deserted camp looked like. I thought that our predictions, that is predictions of prisoners who had watched certain activities by the Germans in the camp, have come true. The Germans, performing their task of exterminating people, were at the same time wary to skillfully cover traces of their crime. What does block 25 look like today? It is an empty shack, covered in flowers growing as high as a man, and only those who were there know what happened in that block and what lies under those flowers. In 1943, the Germans started building toilets, which have survived till this day. I will stress that they were reluctant to let us use them. Prisoners working in the fields rarely used those toilets, but prisoners who worked in the camp received in this regard better treatment and were allowed to use the newly built toilets. It was obvious that the Germans wanted to preserve both the toilets and the bathrooms in case they had to leave that place, and to have a proof for people who would like to judge them. Before that period, the toilets were just an enormous tub where many people drowned. The Germans thought that the prisoners did not need different toilets. They built the new toilets thinking about the future. The fact that the barracks had been made of such poor material meant two things. First of all for us, during our stay in the camp, it was a nightmare, because the conditions were less than primitive. Secondly, the buildings easily rotted and became dilapidated. The Germans thought that in this way they would be considered free from blame.
I have found out that defendant Wagner is present here today. When I came to the camp, he worked as the head of the kitchen. One day, a female prisoner driven by hunger (it was a time when it was prohibited to send packages to the camp) came to the kitchen to steal a few potatoes. Wagner acted in a way that terrified everyone, even though the camp was a place where people were indifferent to many kinds of cruelty. He ran up to her, lifted her and threw her into a ditch. Then, he took her out and threw her in again. He threw her like that until she fainted. It was a time when water for washing or drinking was completely unobtainable. Typhoid makes people extremely thirsty and very often sick women, despite the fever and weakness, would literally make pilgrimages through the mud and wire entanglements between the barracks to get to the kitchen, where they could put their bowl under the tap and get a bit of water if the head of the kitchen was absent. I also took part in those pilgrimages, so I know what it was like. Wagner considered such behavior an extraordinary crime. He beat us many times. As a matter of fact, it happened on a daily basis. Once I saw him call a woman with a bowl and say with a kind smile, “You’ll get water”. Then, he pointed a rubber hose at her, made her all wet and let her out like that in the freezing cold. I think that it led the woman, who had typhoid fever or had just recovered, to a certain death.
In 1944, when transports from Warsaw arrived at Auschwitz, I worked in a unit that replaced towels for the prisoners. Looking through those towels was, to a certain extent, like looking through the prisoners’ lives. Apart from clothes, all personal items, such as tissues or cloths, were prohibited, so the towels served different purposes. I remember that there was a scarlet fever outbreak in the blocks. Children who had fallen sick were kept separately from those who stayed healthy. We received the towels from the block with scarlet fever and we put them with the towels used by healthy children and adults. They were all mixed together and sent to the laundry, where no disinfection was carried out. This was another reason why epidemics spread in the camp.
In comparison to all these facts, little things, such as stealing our clothes or deposited valuables, did not count at all, did not offend us and we did not consider them a part of the Germans’ crimes. The Germans benefited a lot at the ramp and in the barracks, where the clothes of Jews were stored. I worked for some time in such a clothes warehouse, where I saw transports of Jewish women from France, Netherlands, Belgium and Yugoslavia. I saw them in the moment they arrived at the camp and I also saw that the Germans not only were cruel towards those women, but they also craved the material property the women had brought with them.
Prisoners who stayed in the camp longer knew that kommando leaders, who had the closest access to the transported women, sent huge amounts of wealth to their families in Germany. They sent them valuables, jewels, clothes stolen from people at the ramp, still warm, stripped off of people who were to go to the crematorium a few hours later.
Everything I said is merely a part of what I witnessed during more than two years in the concentration camp, although I stayed only in one part of that camp, and I belonged to the group of people to whom fate was kinder: I survived.
Presiding Judge: Does the prosecution have any questions in relation to the witness’ testimony?
Prosecution: No.
Presiding Judge: Does the defense have any questions?
Defense Attorneys: No.
Presiding Judge: The witness is excused.