Warsaw, 10 March 1948. Judge Halina Wereńko, a member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Warsaw, interviewed the person named below without administering an oath. 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 | Cecylia Cajmer, née Heliczer |
| Parents’ names | Michał and Helena, née Mester |
| Date of birth | 18 January 1919 in Jezierna, Tarnopol voivodeship |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Education | two years at the faculty of philosophy at the University of Lwów |
| State affiliation | Polish, Jewish nationality |
| Occupation | housewife |
| In October 1941 in Jezierna, | SS-Unterscharführer Erich Minkus (from Zabrze) set up a camp |
for the Jews, taking over a folk house attached to the church for this purpose. He picked out around 100 Jews from among Jezierna’s Jewish population. Other groups of Jews were brought to the camp from other towns and villages of the Tarnopol voivodeship. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded exclusively by Ukrainian militia. The inmates interned at the camp were used to build roads.
Commandant Minkus was of a degenerate type. He beat Jews (men and women) both during roll calls and on other occasions. Then he went home and got drunk. I saw such scenes almost every day as I lived in the house situated opposite the camp. I saw Minkus kill those who were too weak to climb into a car or stand unaided during roll calls.
I don’t know the names of those whom he murdered.
In November or December 1941 (I don’t remember the exact date) some people whose names I cannot specify told me that Minkus shot eight Jews who were taken from the camp to the farm (the Jampolskis’ former property). The Jews were taken there to bury the bodies of the Soviet prisoners from the camp set up in the farm. After discharging their task, they were shot by Minkus.
I don’t know the names of those whom he shot.
In addition, he gave the Ukrainian guards a free hand in murdering the Jews while they were working. The bodies of dead laborers, shot ostensibly for attempting to escape, were brought in almost every day. Minkus tortured the prisoners especially when he hosted his bosses from Lwów. Their visits took place at least once a week. On such occasions the prisoners were publicly abused, laughed at and beaten. Some of them were murdered by Minkus himself who then went with his guests to carouse. He moved into the front apartment of our house. In January 1942 he kicked me, my parents and my 80-year-old grandmother out of our apartment in the night. He beat my grandmother so hard that she lost consciousness. But we still had to work for him. In March 1942 he left Jezierna and was placed in charge of the camp in Borki Wielkie near Tarnopol. Paprocki who works at Polish Radio in Katowice (I don’t know his name) can testify to what Minkus did in this area.
Director Maksymilian Dul and Anna Dul can provide more detailed information about Minkus’ conduct in Jezierna. They live in Ząbkowice Śląskie at Ziembicka Street 45.
Bruno Kościelnik, who comes from Haatsch, Racibórz district, served as Deputy to Minkus. I think he was a Czech Silesian. He worked from the end of October 1942 to mid-January 1942, when he was taken to the eastern front. In order to ingratiate himself with his boss, Kościelnik tortured prisoners, beating them to unconsciousness. I saw this almost every day. I heard that he had shot a number of prisoners.
Different people told me about him, but I don’t know the names of his victims.
Before going on holidays, Kościelnik took the valuables he had wheedled out of the relatives of the camp prisoners to some Volksdeutcher in Lwów.
There were 300 to 400 people in the camp. Their number was fluid. Up to five dead bodies were brought from the camp to the Jewish cemetery every day.
Ryszard Dyga from Bytom (he lived on Fałata Street) replaced Minkus as commandant of the camp in Jezierna where he stayed from March 1942 to the final extermination of the Jews in June 1943. On the first day after his arrival, still in Minkus’ presence, he beat prisoners standing in a row during the roll call. He hit almost everyone.
The moment he arrived at the camp the food rations for prisoners were cut and, consequently, they began to suffer horrible starvation. Prisoners received a watery soup twice a day, in the morning and after their return from work. In the morning they were also given a slice of bread. When a farmer’s horse or other animal died, the remains were taken to the camp’s kitchen. As a result, prisoners began to suffer from dysentery and all sorts of stomach ailments. It was forbidden to give food to prisoners. Ukrainian guards were ordered to place in the camp or beat those who tried to supply prisoners with food. After Dyga’s arrival I saw many inmates become sick and swollen from hunger. Dysentery was rampant. During the morning roll calls or when the prisoners were getting on trucks to be taken to work, Dyga – this I saw – murdered those who were weak and who found it hard to climb into a truck or to stand on their own.
The guards were ordered to shoot those who tried to escape. Except for shooting those who attempted to escape, Dyga chose two or three other prisoners who were hanged as a punishment for the escape attempts. I often saw bodies hanging in the garden of the property in which the camp was set up, near the road leading to the church.
On 10 October 1942 I went to Polesie, on the eve of the expulsion of the Jews who were still outside the camp from Jezierna to the Ghetto in Zborów. The Jews were ordered to go with all their belongings to Zborów under pain of death.
In December 1942, I was arrested in Pińsk on suspicion of being of non-Aryan origin. In April 1943, I was deported to Germany as a forced laborer.
In December 1944 in Berlin I met Dora Dodyk, a Ukrainian who was a sister of the Orthodox priest from Jezierna (I don’t know where she lives now). She told me about the final extermination of the Jews in Jezierna. One morning in June 1943, the camp was surrounded by Ukrainian guards and the Gestapo men from Tarnopol. A student from Tarnopol, Fryderyk Wasler, committed suicide on that occasion. Around 500 Jews from the camp were put on trucks and taken to the Jewish cemetery. On the way Wilhelm Lonfer attempted to escape but was shot by Dyga. Wounded, he was put on a cart and taken to the cemetery.
Dodyk learned what had happened from the gravedigger’s wife, a Pole (I know neither her name nor her address) who went to Poland. Once in the grounds of the cemetery, Dyga shot those with whom he was better acquainted and whom he may have liked. This group included: the camp doctor Wilhelm Tenenbaum, a nurse Szapir and her 14-year-old daughter Lusia, Józef Szol, a student from Tarnopol and his fiancée Berkowicz (from Tarnopol), the student’s mother, Lander (the owner of the shop in Jezierna) and his daughter, and Natan Pakiet, a merchant. Before shooting the prisoners, he robbed them of all the gold things they had left. The remaining prisoners were shot by the Ukrainian militia, but Dyga supervised the execution. Dead bodies were arranged into a pile and burnt. For 48 hours guards kept an eye on the pile with a view to preventing the wounded from running away from the flames.
After this mass execution, Dyga and his men searched the surrounding area for the Jews who had gone into hiding. As a result of this search they found and killed the following people: a tailor Borunsztejn, Fryderyk Fuchs, Rozalia Pakiet. After the liquidation of the camp, Dyga auctioned the things he had stolen from his victims to the locals in his own house. Some of the things were taken to Germany by Georg Schuchardt, the owner of an export company in Tarnopol, to be sold off.
Paperyn and his wife can provide more details concerning the extermination of the Jews in Jezierna (they hid in Jezierna until the final liquidation of the camp) and so can Maksymilian and Anna Dul, whom I mentioned above, who remained in Jezierna until [the day is missing from the date] October 1942.
At this point the report was concluded and read out.