Warsaw, 12 March 1948. A member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Warsaw, Judge Halina Wereńko, heard the person named below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the obligation to tell the truth, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Adam Kuryłowicz, former prisoner of the concentration camp in Auschwitz |
| Parents’ names | Bronisław and Anna, née Nitkówna |
| Date of birth | 21 December 1890, in Kłyżów, Nisko district |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Education | secondary technical |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Karska Street 1 |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Occupation | Deputy Head of PKP [Polish State Railways] in Wrocław, Deputy of the Polish Parliament, General Secretary of KC ZZ [Central Commission of Trade Unions] |
I was brought to Auschwitz in the third Warsaw transport from Pawiak in July 1941. I came upon Stanisław Dubois, who was already at the camp. He had been arrested and imprisoned under the name of Stanisław Dębski.
Before leaving Pawiak, I met a prisoner named Targowski, who posed as an attorney. He declared that when the Gestapo interrogated him about the Polish communists, he told them that Stanisław Dubois was imprisoned under the name of Stanisław Dębski.
In the late fall of 1941, Dubois was brought back to Pawiak, from where he returned to Auschwitz in March or at the beginning of April 1942.
I was friends with Stanisław Dubois and we both belonged to the Polish underground leftist organization in Auschwitz. We kept in touch every day. Having returned from Pawiak, Dubois declared that he had been exposed, that the Gestapo in Warsaw knew his real name – which he didn’t deny – that they demanded that he give the names of Polish communists during the interrogation, which he didn’t do.
In August 1942, I was sick with typhus and I was staying at the hospital. On Friday, 19 August (I remember the day of the week, I’m not sure about the exact date), after the evening roll call, Dubois, very depressed, came to the window of the rewir [hospital], where I was staying. He told me that he had been interrogated for several hours at the Political Department that afternoon. He was asked about his friends in Stockholm, how they had been able get precise information about his stay at the camp. Dubois answered that he didn’t know. He was asked if he knew Mieczysław Thugutt – he answered that he was his friend from school. Finally, he heard that Mieczysław Thugutt had sent him a food parcel and it was given to him. Prisoners were not allowed to receive parcels at the time. One-kilogram parcels were only allowed in December 1942. The interrogating Gestapo officer had all of Dubois’s personal files and he treated him brutally. For the first time in Auschwitz, he was called by his real name, Dubois, and not Dębski, which he had been using until then. When I recovered from typhus, Dubois left me a bar of chocolate and sardines from the parcel. On Saturday evening, he came to me in a better mood, but he warned me that he wouldn’t be able to come for a while due to the ordered delousing of his block (as part of the disinfection of all barracks because of the epidemic). He stopped by for a moment on Sunday, saying that the disinfection was to take place in his block.
On Monday, 22 August 1942 (I remember the exact day of the week, but I’m not sure about the date), my fellow prisoners informed me that in block 11, that is, the death block, Leichenträgers – prisoners employed to carry the corpses – had carried Stanisław Dubois’s corpse to the truck near the hospital block 28, where I was staying.
I got up from the pallet, I went to the truck and I didn’t recognize the corpse. It was the body of a naked man, murdered with a shot to the cerebellum from an automatic rifle. His eyes were blasted, his face deformed and livid due to an internal hemorrhage. That’s when I saw the number tattooed on the arm. If I remember correctly, it was no. 2,367. I gave the number to the prisoner who was a clerk at the administrative office of block 28, Władysław Mucha (currently residing in Poznań, where he works at the Social Insurance). Mucha confirmed that the number I gave him was the one assigned to Stanisław Dubois. So it was his deformed body that I had seen and did not recognize.
On the basis of conversations with the prisoners I established what happened to Dubois in the last moments before death. Dubois had been working at the concrete plant and staying in block 4. His work companions told me that on the day of his death, he worked with them for the whole morning, he was getting dinner. Around 3.00 p.m., two SS men from the Political Department called out his number and took him from his workplace. They led him to block 11. The prisoners of the hospital block 21 saw Dubois passing by, he even smiled and waved his hand goodbye. He was walked into the baths, where the prisoners always had to undress completely before an execution. That’s where two Leichenträgers (prisoners used for carrying corpses) saw him. One of them was Eugeniusz Obojski. I don’t remember the name of the other one. I learned from them that Stanisław Dubois, brought onto the yard without his clothes, a moment before he was hit by the bullet, shouted: “Poland is not yet lost.” Dubois was executed by Palitzsch, who shot him in the back of his head with an automatic rifle (the shot was almost inaudible).
Wondering what caused the death of Stanisław Dubois, I came to the conclusion that the food parcel that came from Thugutt from Stockholm, with Dubois’s name and the number assigned to him, was the reason for which Dubois was executed.
At this the report was concluded and read out.