Record of Witness Testimony 17

POLISH SOURCE INSTITUTE IN LUND Malmö, 30 November 1945 Testimony received by Institute Assistant Krystyna Karier transcribed Record of Witness Testimony 17 Here stands Mr Ludwik Walasik born on 12 August 1910 in Apolda (Thuringia, Germany) , occupation sailor religion Roman Catholic , parents’ forenames Tomasz, Józefa last place of residence in Poland Gdynia current place of residence Gdynia who – having been cautioned as to the importance of truthful testimony as well as to the responsibility for, and consequences of, false testimony – hereby declares as follows: I was interned at the concentration camp in Stuffhof from 9 February 1943 to 24 March 1945 as a political prisoner bearing the number 19378 and wearing a red -coloured triangle with the letter ‘P’. I was later interned in at the Neuengamme camp (including evacuation therefrom) from 24 March 1945 to 3 May 1945. Asked whether, with regard to my internment and my labour at the concentration camp, I possess any particular knowledge about how the camp was organized, how prisoners were treated, their living and working conditions, medical and pastoral care, the hygienic conditions in the camp, or any particular events concerning any aspect of camp life, I state as follows: The statement consists of seven and a half pages (two pages appended) and describes the following: 1. The Stutthof camp – numerically and in terms of living conditions 2. Return to Gdańsk further to an investigation 3. The camp in Stutthof – the drive to eliminate the Jews at the women’s camp in Stutthof during the spring of 1944, the evacuation of Jewish men and women by barge, and the detonation of one of the barges 4. The gassing of a group of Polish partisans – several hundred people – the witness’s own observations 5. The state of the camp following the arrival of transports from ‘evacuated’ Warsaw – August 1944 6. Gdynia shipyard – numerically and in terms of the living and working conditions there as of November 1944 7. The evacuation of the camp – voyages on the ships Cap Arcona and Athen [sic, the witness actually refers to the Elbing and the Zefir at this point] [stamp] POLISH SOURCE INSTITUTE IN LUND [hand-written mark for ‘continued overleaf’] [/stamp] BLOM’S PRINTING, LUND 1945 8. The Arbeitserziehungslager [Ger., lit. ‘work education camp’] in Kiel – forced labour clearing rubble 9. The camp in Neuengamme – several days’ internment 10. The assignment of the witness to an underground airbase in Schleswig 11. Dispatch of transport to Lübeck and re-embarkation [sic] aboard the ships Cap Arcona and Athen – voyage without food or water 12. Transfer to the Cap Arcona and then back to the Athen – the burning of the Cap Arcona and Deutschland with prisoners on board 13. Panic and fighting amidst the prisoners’ rush to abandon ship 14. Liberation [stamp] POLISH SOURCE INSTITUTE IN LUND [/stamp] Malmö, 30 November 1945 Polish Source Institute in Lund Testimony received by Institute Assistant – Krystyna Karier Record of Witness Testimony Here stands Mr Ludwik Walasik born on 12 August 1910 in Apolda (Thuringia, Germany): occupation – sailor; religion – Roman Catholic; parents’ forenames – Tomasz, Józefa; last place of residence in Poland – Gdynia; and current place of residence in Poland – Gdynia. I was interned at the concentration camp in Stutthof from 9 February 1943 to 24 March 1945 as a political prisoner bearing the number 19378 and wearing a red-coloured triangle with the letter ‘P’; I was later interned at Neuengamme from 24 March 1945 to 3 May 1945. I was arrested in Gdańsk on 20 November 1942 on charges of associating with individuals who continued to work in an underground organization that was later merged with the Home Army. I was taken to the basement of the Gdańsk Gestapo headquarters and placed in a shared cell holding around a dozen people. From the Gdańsk Gestapo headquarters I was transported to the camp in Stutthof. The camp at that time numbered around 3,000 people; Poles made up at least 40% of that figure. A most effective method of finishing people off was [the combination of] twelve hours of hard labour, camp rations (coffee in the morning [note written above text] and evening [/note], 300 grams of bread for the whole day, 30 grams of margarine a day, and 1 litre of soup for dinner), strict discipline, ever-lengthening roll calls (two to three hours), sanitary conditions, and lack of proper clothing. I would describe the medical care as treatment by truncheon, an epidemic of typhus. I worked in the vicinity of the crematorium and, from what I observed, around thirty dead bodies were removed from the camp every day: five coffins holding three people each twice a day. In March 1943, 109 people from one block died in a single day due to typhus and exhaustion. There were special blocks where the weak and sick would be placed to finish them off. At the end of August 1943, I was taken back to Gestapo headquarters in Gdańsk in connection with an investigation being carried out, an entirely unrelated case which had come about when entirely different people on the outside had their cover blown. Beating was used during the interrogation; however, having failed to prove anything against me, they sent me back to the camp after two months in the Gestapo headquarters basement. In the spring of 1944, transports of Jews from eastern Europe (from Latvia) and Jewish women from the Łódź ghetto were brought in; the latter had already spent several days at the camp in Auschwitz. A wired-off section of our camp housed the women’s camp, where there were a dozen or so thousand inmates. One twelve- by-fifty-metre barrack building held 1,500 women, with no beds. At that time, a special campaign was being conducted against the Jewish women: one of the SS-Oberscharführers [SS rank, lit. ‘senior platoon leaders’] who was an overseer at the camp would carry out examinations of the women every day and segregate them, ordering them to stand to the left or the right. The women thus selected were trucked away to the gas chamber or given injections. You could see the gas chamber and crematorium from the camp. On our way back to the camp from work we would see women being driven over to the chamber. The same kind of selections would sometimes take place in the men’s camp, but on a smaller scale. Around 3,000 Jewish women were finished off that way. Out of a total of 15,000 Jewish men and women, around 1,000 were saved (that is, saved from the gas chamber). During the evacuation of the camp, they were shipped out on barges along with the Revier [Ger., infirmary] patients. One of these barges, which had about 1,000 Jewish women on board, was set adrift by SS men and blown up. According to captains of the German ships, such as the Athen and Cap Arcona, the same fate was supposed to befall all the prisoners from Neuengamme and Stutthof who were aboard ships near the town of Neustadt. It was supposed to happen on the night of 3–4 May. On the afternoon of 3 May, we were taken by English forces. In the summer of 1944 a group of several hundred suspected partisans was brought to the camp; they were Poles from the Białystok area. Individual death sentences would be carried out either by hanging or by a shot fired from a revolver to the back of the head. Mass executions would be carried out by gassing. In this case, an order probably came through that this group of partisans were to be gassed. The first group of over 100 people, carrying shovels under the pretence of a work deployment, were led out of the camp and into the gas chamber. Or rather they were pushed into it – by SS men. You could see it happening from the camp and the workshops. Other prisoners, myself among them, witnessed it. After the chamber had been filled with people, the gas was thrown inside; it looked like canisters of white powder. Then you could hear screams coming from inside the chamber. The SS men stayed outside, of course. When roughly half an hour had passed, the chamber was opened up and the prisoners who worked at the crematorium (three prisoners) started dragging out the corpses. The position of the bodies showed signs that there had been a struggle in the chamber; many victims had bite marks on their arms and other wounds on their bodies. The gas must have been very weak or slow-acting. When the next hundred were being led in, one of them broke away and made to escape. Shots rang out and the whole group started to flee. Unfamiliar with the layout of the camp, most of them took the road between the old and new camps, along each side of which there were several guard towers. Machine-gun fire erupted from these, killing or wounding would-be escapees. The survivors were [note written above text] killed [/note] by the Rapportführer [SS rank, lit. ‘report leader’] and Hauptscharführer [‘chief platoon leader’] Chemnitz inspected them, finishing off any left alive, which he would first determine with a kick. That scene unfolded before the eyes of the entire camp. During the gunfire from the towers, two people were killed and several wounded. The third hundred were tied up by kapos [prisoner functionaries] and handed over to the ‘gasworks’, where the sentence was carried out. In mid-August 1944, the camp started to fill up with evacuees from camps to the east and from the Warsaw Uprising.

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