ELŻBIETA WITUSKA

Warsaw, 11 February 1946 r. Member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Warsaw, Judge Alicja Germasz, interviewed the person specified below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the wording of Art. 107 and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the witness testified as follows:


Name and surname Elżbieta Wituska
Names of parents Feliks and Helena
Age 49
Place of residence Warszawa, Chłodna Street 41, flat 42
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Education
Occupation

I lived together with my husband in the house at Wolska Street 123. During the first days of the uprising our district was peaceful, only sometimes you could hear distant shooting. All the tenants were in their flats.

On 5 August around 9 in the morning, the janitor called out from the courtyard that we were to leave the flats with our hands up. I ran down to the yard, my husband lingered in the flat. We left the yard in one large group of people, men, women and children, there were a few hundred of us – tenants from fifty-seven flats. In front of the gate, on two sides, there stood rows of Germans and “Ukrainians” with guns. Between these rows we crossed to the other side of Wolska Street to an empty lot opposite our house. We found many German soldiers standing there. On the pavement there were around fifty bodies of dead and wounded Poles, civilians.

We were all ordered to lie on the ground. After a while a tank approached and fired at us several times. When it left, soldiers came and started to kill off those who were still alive. After a while the tank returned, again it fired, and then again soldiers were checking who was still alive, and if someone was, they killed them. This was repeated a few times.

I lay on the ground pretending to be dead, I covered myself with a coat and I observed what was going on through a hole in the coat. Around me there was nothing but dead bodies. Bodies of neighbours from my house – the two Konkowski sisters and Jadwiga Stelmasiak – lay on top of me. Beside me lay my neighbour Lipińska with her two daughters.

I stayed on the ground until 6 in the afternoon. Then the shooting subsided. Poles came, who under German command were collecting corpses from the street and putting them behind the fence of a neighbouring property. I got up then. Around six hundred people had been killed. A German soldier took me to a group of people standing on the road, these were all of those who had survived, numbering around forty people (men, women and children). The Germans took the men to work, and women they herded to St Lawrence church in Wola, and further on to Pruszków.

I state that while I was lying on the ground in Wolska Street, I saw that the Germans were bringing more and more groups of people from the nearby houses.

I have had no news of my husband to date. As far as I know, only the following four people from my house survived: Helena Szeliga (residing on Armatnia Street), Barbara Chlebowska (I don’t have her address), Grabowski (I don’t know his first name or address).

The report was read.