On 16 June 1947 in Kraków, a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, District Investigating Judge Jan Sehn, acting at the written request of the first prosecutor of the Supreme National Tribunal dated 25 April 1947 (file no. NTN 719/47), in accordance with the provisions of and procedure provided for under the Decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 51, item 293), pursuant to article 254, 107, 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, heard as a witness the person named below, a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Auschwitz, who testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Teresa Wicińska |
| Date of birth | 24 February 1912 |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Occupation | secondary school teacher |
| Place of residence | Nowe Brzesko (during vacation time Kraków, Rakowicka Street 6) |
I stayed in the Auschwitz concentration camp from April 1942 until August 1944 as political prisoner no. 6817. Until the beginning of August 1942, I was in the Auschwitz I camp, where the women’s camp was located and then until April 1943 I was in the women’s camp in Birkenau, from April 1943 until June 1944 in the Babice sub-camp, and from August 1944 in the women’s camp in Birkenau again.
Some time after the relocation of the women’s camp from Auschwitz to Birkenau, Maria Mandl took office there. She held the highest position; we called her the commandant. I recognized Mandl currently in the photographs exhibited, and by name I remembered her perfectly. She was very cruel. I saw her myself giving the hospital cleaners a particularly brutal pounding. She was slapping them around the face because, I think, they had emptied the rubbish in the wrong place. Another time, I witnessed Mandl tell the hospital cleaners to clear out the rubbish from a sewage ditch with their hands. This was particularly severe, because there was human excrement in the ditch from prisoners suffering from typhoid, Durchfall and others, and that water was treacherous, and the female prisoners employed in this job also couldn’t wash their hands properly because they didn’t have any soap. I saw a few prisoners, three or four, doing this job under Mandl’s supervision.
The women’s camp in Babice was located in a former Polish elementary school. About 200 Polish, Ukrainian and Russian women lived there. We were employed in the construction of roads, the demolition of buildings formerly inhabited by people who had been displaced and we also did some agricultural and drainage work. In this camp, just behind the wire separating them from the women’s camp, there was a men’s kommando, about one hundred prisoners including Poles, Jews of all nationalities and Russians. The women and men worked on a farm with about 2,000 morgen of land. The work was difficult, especially for the intelligentsia who were not used to it. The crew harbored a particular hatred towards the intelligentsia. Among some other friends of mine who were with me in Babice, I remember Pelagia Lewińska, the author of a book about Auschwitz, Halina Turkiewicz from Warsaw, Jadwiga Pawliszewska from Warsaw, Janina Obtułowicz from Chrzanów and Zofia Mitelstädt from Warsaw. In the men’s camp, the Jews were treated exceptionally cruelly and ground down, and no one was any different – all the men were treated inhumanly. The Jewish prisoners died sooner because they had already been broken mentally. The corpses of the murdered and the deceased were transported by car to the crematorium in Auschwitz. Cars also took away prisoners who had lost their strength and were no longer fit for work. SS man Kommandoführer Otto Scherbinski was distinguished among the men’s camp crew in terms of his cruelty. He is a man of medium height, with crooked legs. He beat the male prisoners, chased them around the blocks, and in the winter he told them to wash in cold water from the well.
The report was read out. At this the hearing and the report were concluded.