MATEUSZ PIWOWARSKI

In Ujazd on this day, 14 April 1949, at 1.00 p.m., I, Jan Bech, sergeant from the Citizens’ Militia Station in Ujazd and commandant of the station, acting on the basis of Article 20 of the provisions introducing the Code of Criminal Procedure, on the instructions of citizen Deputy Prosecutor from the Region of the Prosecutor’s Office of the District Court, this issued on the basis of Article 20 of the provisions introducing the Code of Criminal Procedure, observing the formal requirements set forward in Articles 235–240, 258 and 259 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, with the participation of a reporter, militiaman Marian Sobkiewicz, whom I have informed of his obligation to attest to the conformity of the report with the actual course of the procedure by his own signature, have heard the person named below as a witness. Having been advised of the right to refuse to testify for the reasons set forward in Article 104 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and of the criminal liability for making false declarations, this pursuant to the provisions of Article 140 of the Penal Code, the witness testified as follows:


Name and surname Mateusz Piwowarski
Parents’ names Maciej and Marianna, née Gozdzik
Age 72 years old
Place of birth Skrzynki, Łazisko commune, Brzeziny district
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Occupation farmer
Place of residence Skrzynki, Łazisko commune, Brzeziny district
Relationship to the parties none

I don’t remember the exact date, but it was during the German occupation. I was taken to a penal labor camp in the township of Zawada, Łazisko commune, Brzeziny district, for failure to deliver the milk quota. Approximately 250 people worked in that camp. I don’t know the surnames of the Germans who supervised people in that camp. I stayed there for two months. In that camp, the Germans treated us Poles in a cruel manner: they gave us little food, which was insubstantial as they cooked unclean cabbage leaves swarming with all sorts of vermin, without any fat. We had to work all day in water, regardless of whether it was warm or cold. For the slightest offence, or even for no reason at all, they beat us in cruel way, not paying any heed to the age or state of health of their victim, as a result of which many people fell ill and were taken, in all probability, to the hospital in Tomaszów. Those who recovered were brought again for labor in the camp.

There weren’t any casualties during my stay in the camp, and I haven’t heard about anyone being deported to a concentration camp. When the harvest came, we were all released home.

I would like to explain that if the laborers who worked there hadn’t received food from their families, they would have all dropped from exhaustion, as the food we got in the camp wouldn’t sustain anyone throughout the period of two or three months, and dozens of people would have perished in a couple of weeks.

I also know that during the occupation, when they were liquidating the ghetto in Ujazd, the Germans marched masses of Jews to the train station in Ujazd, where they loaded them onto a wagon, and on the way to the station they killed a few Jews, but I don’t know their surnames, and I don’t know the surnames of the gendarmes who perpetrated these crimes.

At this point the report was concluded, read out and signed.