On 5 December 1946 in Łódź, S. Kryżanowska, investigating judge of the District Court in Łódź, interviewed the person specified below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal responsibility for making false declarations and of the wording of article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Jerzy Skotnicki |
| Age | 44 |
| Names of parents | Henryk and Stefania |
| Place of residence | Łódź, Andrzeja Struga Street 35 |
| Occupation | Engineer in a chemical plant |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
| I | was brought in to the Auschwitz camp in June 1943. I worked, in chronological order, |
building the water works with the Kommandoplanierung [leveling unit]; then, after a lay-off due to contracting spotted typhus, from which I was recovering in the camp hospital, I worked there for four weeks as a sweeper; next, I worked with the Kommandoweberei [weavers’ unit], manufacturing various ancillary items from leather, rubber, and cellophane scraps, and then I worked at the arms factory and unloading ammunition. Then, I was transferred to a new but inoperative “sauna” – the bathhouse in the Birkenau (B IIg) Effektenlager. Through this job, I had contact with prisoners from various camps and with newly-arrived prisoners, the so-called Zugangs. My job was to operate a disinfection cauldron, which was placed next to the table where a Schreiber [clerk] kept a log of people entering and exiting the bathhouse. Such a log had the following columns: transport’s date of arrival, departure point, type of transport, number of prisoners, their sex, date of bathing and of leaving the “sauna” for the camp or another location, and notes. If applicable, the “notes” column stated reasons why the number of those arriving at the “sauna” did not tally with the number of those departing for the camp. This happened if a selection of sorts was performed in the “sauna”, whereby those individuals were set aside who were handicapped, pregnant, had ulcers, and were indicated by the doctor or his deputy from the SDG [Sanitätsdienstgrade, auxiliary medical personnel]. The people thus selected were taken straight to a crematorium. For example, I remember one such note made upon the arrival of three Hungarian women who had been interned at Auschwitz before. They were pregnant. In the log, next to their names, in the “notes” column, it read, “Sb”. All of them were taken to a crematorium. I also remember seven Russian officers who had just arrived from the POW camp: they were bathed, had their Aufnahme [admission] sheets compiled, and were then tattooed, and all this was done to deceive these officers, who suspected that they were going to be executed. Apparently, resistance on their part was anticipated. The Aufnahme clerks later told us that the admission sheets of these officers had been destroyed, and we ourselves saw them being taken down the path leading to the crematorium. Ludwik Przybyła, a railway officer (resident of Katowice, Gliwicka Street 14), should have recollection of this incident. The so-called Lublin transport was also handled in the same way. These were girls from Majdanek, who – being familiar with the circumstances at that camp and with how things were dealt with there – said that they would surely be gassed because they knew too much. In order to calm them, they had the Aufnahme sheets compiled, were tattooed, and then sent to the camp and issued food rations, together with Zulages [extra portions]. The next day, it turned out that the girls had been taken to the crematorium at night. In the morning, as we were marching to the labor site past the crematorium, we saw food scraps and abandoned rations. In fact, the strategy of issuing food rations before gassing people was employed in the case of the Czech camp transport. It was the camp in field B II b, the so-called Czech Familienlager. At one point, all men and young childless women were dispatched to other camps, while the rest, that is women with children, the elderly, and adolescents, were gassed. All of them were issued extra food rations to create the impression that they were leaving on a transport.
The very admission process was designed in such a way that the prisoner was already intimidated and roughed up, so that he would know that on entering the camp he no longer had any human rights – as long as he made it alive to the gates, that is. The transport on which I arrived at Auschwitz departed from Radom at 3 AM. We had our hands tied behind our backs and we were warned that breaking the string would be considered attempted escape, which was punishable by shooting. Our hands tied behind our backs, we had to get on a truck, and then in a wagon. To speed up the process of loading us on the trucks or in the wagons, our guards, that is SS men, gendarmes (Schutzpolizei), and the Sonderdienst [special unit] hit us with rods. In a cargo wagon, they only let us take up half of the floor space, so the 90 of us had to lie one on top of the other. It was prohibited to stand or sit and to eat or smoke, but they had not issued any rations to us anyway, nor did they give us anything to drink during the whole journey, even though it was a scorching June already. Our arms swelled and were giving us excruciating pain. Taking us from the ramp was already the Auschwitz crew. They escorted us to the camp, punching us and hitting us on the backs with rifle butts all the time. It was especially the weakest ones, exhausted from the harrowing journey, that were whacked mercilessly. The Radom transport on which I got to Auschwitz numbered 600 people, out of whom 18 did not make it to the camp, having been beaten to death on their way from the ramp by ordinary guards. I know it was 18 people because the next day the numerical strength of the transport was checked during the admission, and it turned out that 16 or 18 people were missing. This fact was not met with any surprise, nor did it prompt any official inquiry into who perpetrated a mass murder and why. I remember that during this passage the guards asked individuals whose appearance indicated intelligence and high social status about their occupation. They asked if they were judges or attorneys, and they killed such people with rifle butts on the spot. Also, all the Jews from this transport were killed on their way to the camp, murdered by ordinary guards, who were not even on the camp crew but guarded the camp from the outside. Let me add that those Jews were killed whose appearance betrayed their “non-Aryan” roots.
The subsequent stages of the admission process – that is bathing and shaving all hairy parts – took place with utter contempt to one’s sense of privacy or human dignity. Bathing and undressing always happened in the presence of men, and it was not even a rule that women were shaved by female barbers.
It was also in the “sauna” that, in December 1944, I saw young Jewish female prisoners having their blood forcefully collected. I asked one SS man why they needed such amounts of Jewish blood, because some 30 liters were collected daily; he said that it was for other Jews, who were sick.
The Polish doctors will surely offer a more precise account of the hospital-related issues, and I will only talk about my personal experience. I was down with typhus for 16 days and I did not receive any medication whatsoever, not even once. The alimentation was the same as in the case of fit prisoners. The only aspect they ostensibly went about with care was cleanliness, but you bathed with a high fever, in cold water, at another block, from where you had to return to the camp hospital without having dried yourself – because there were no towels – plus you bathed with other prisoners in a small vat, in the water in which a couple dozen people had already bathed. Driven to the “sauna” were sick people, naked, without shirts, only covered with blankets, from another camp, located, say, some two kilometers away. There were also cases of the sick dying in the “sauna” during bathing. The only radical solution to reduce the number of the sick were selections. During my bout, two or three such selections took place. They were performed by the German camp doctors, the SDG, political division, and Blockführers [block leaders]. When I was a patient at the infectious diseases ward in 1943, I saw that one selection was carried out by prisoner-doctor Zengteler. On that occasion, he selected three Greeks for gassing, even though they still could not move. Zengteler was head prisoner-doctor. If memory serves me right, during this selection, more than 700 people from the camp hospital were selected for gassing, and in the scale of the entire camp, this number stood at between one and five thousand. Sealing your fate during a selection were scabies, leg swelling, phlegmon, or fur on the tongue. The treatment on the way to the crematorium was as brutal as in the case of prisoners walking from the ramp to the camp, of which I spoke earlier. Women were transported on trucks down the main camp street, conscious and frequently naked, because the block elder had forced their clothes off them, and they often screamed for help. At the entrance to the crematorium, the truck’s floor slanted up and a tangle of women fell to the pavement. Using rods, and often assisted by dogs, the Sonderkommando [special unit] drove them to the gas chamber. Gassing was only effected when there was a sufficiently high number of people. Smaller groups, of 20 or 30 people, were executed by shooting. Aryans were executed individually, and when the shot was fired they were held by the ears so they would not dodge a bullet. This was the task of the Sonderkommando prisoners, who were mostly Jews. Jews were executed by shooting in the crematorium, in groups, when other prisoners could see it. I was told about it by a young boy who had been sent to the crematorium on the camp commandant’s orders to halt the execution of a selected group of twenty-some people from a Płaszów transport. This boy told me that he had seen an SS man shooting, one by one, at women who stood in a row. He said that these women were snapping their fingers as they watched their comrades going down one by one. I think the boy’s name was Waligóra. These women were driven naked from the “sauna” to the crematorium (a distance of a few hundred meters). I know that sending people to the other side during this execution – or actually during almost all executions of Płaszów transports – was Chustek. Chustek is a nickname – he was called Ebert.
Concerning the gassings again, I need to say that one SS man told me that he had been sentenced to 21 days in the bunker because he had spoken out saying that if they had to gas the Jews, they should at least give them enough gas. We knew – and this is what this SS man told me in confidence – that at that time, in 1944, only a quarter of the proper amount of cyclone was used (half a can instead of two cans).
I had a direct contact with Höss in the following circumstances. An SS man on guard duty in the “sauna” accused me of speaking to the women who were bathing. Although I denied it, because it was not true, the SS man said that, on the orders of Höss, who had strictly forbidden any contacts between male and female prisoners, he would hand out the punishment of 25 rod strikes to me. Since SS man Waldemar Bedarf was drunk at that time, I received 35 strikes, the rod breaking three times in the process, and afterwards I was incapacitated for four weeks.
My understanding was that Höss was special commissioner for the Jewish affairs because even when he was no longer camp commandant he still visited the “sauna” and was interested in how it operated and how many transports were processed in 1944, when Jewish transports were coming in. His official title was Sonderbenuftragte für die Judenaktion [special representative for the Jewish action]. Actually, in summer 1944, the orders concerning the Jews were coming directly from the RSHA in Berlin and Höss executed these orders, being the highest-ranking officer, or at least one of the highest- ranking. I believe that his jurisdiction and competence were broad because when in summer 1944 transports were interrupted after 500,000 to 600,000 Hungarian Jews were delivered (and I heard elsewhere that the interruption was a result of the Bishop of Canterbury’s call to the Hungarians, who sabotaged the Germans’ orders in that they invoked the lack of wagons, because the wagons which had gone to Poland were not returned to the Germans), Höss went to Budapest to intervene, and in the absence of wagons he arranged for the Hungarian Jews to be transported in trucks. Indeed, a few trucks with Jews had arrived.
From the “sauna” windows, we could see woodpiles of logs and split timber lying outdoors along the road leading in the direction of the old house of the village mayor, and toward the location of what at that time was the so-called crematorium V. We tried to see how much wood was used for the daily operations of the crematorium. Converting this to a likely number of those who had been gassed and incinerated in the meantime, we calculated that the wood lying there would be enough to incinerate five million people. When mass gassings were abandoned in fall 1944, they began to remove the wood, the hard timber being chopped to be processed into petrol for cars running on gas wood.
I know that, in order to catch them off-guard, the few survivors from each Czech or Hungarian transport were forced to immediately send letters to relatives. They had to write that they were in a labor camp, that they were doing well, and were looking forward to a visit. They had to indicate that the letter was departing not from Auschwitz, which was already known as a concentration camp, but from Birkenau, and later even from Waldsee, a rather frequently-visited town on the Swiss border. Jews from subsequent transports told me that they had received such letters.
The report was read out.