On 21 August 1947 in Kraków, a member of the Kraków District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Municipal Judge Dr. Henryk Gawacki, upon written request of the first prosecutor of the Supreme National Tribunal, this 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), in connection with Art. 254, 107, 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, with the participation of reporter Stanisław Malec, secretary of the Prosecutor’s Office of the District Court in Kraków, interviewed the former Auschwitz concentration camp inmate specified below as a witness, who then testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Kazimierz Smoleń |
| Date of birth | 15 November 1917 |
| Parent’s names | Michał and Aniela |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Occupation | office worker at the cooperative "Społem" |
| Place of residence | Kraków, Basztowa Street 4, flat 14 |
| Testifies freely. |
I was interviewed on 14 April 1945 in the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland during the criminal investigation against Rudolf Höß. To this testimony regarding the conduct of the former members of the SS armed crew of the camp, I would like to add the following:
At the end of April or the beginning of May 1943, another prisoner Franciszek Rybicki from Rańcza, chemistry student at the University of Lwów, was a patient at the same hospital as me when I was sick. His recovery was almost complete. He had been sent to the hospital because of a sore on his leg. Shortly before his release date, he was summoned to the Political Department for an interrogation concerning the people arrested in the so-called General Government, as he later told me. Rybicki was summoned to the Political Department office several times. He was interrogated for about two weeks. Each time he returned from the interrogation bruised and almost black as a result of being beaten. He told me that he could not endure it much longer, because he felt increasingly weaker, and that Grabner was the one who conducted the interrogation and ordered SS men to beat him. When Rybicki finally could not move on his own, because his bones and ribs were broken, he was driven to the Political Department. At one point after he was taken there again, he never came back to the hospital. I learned that his file read that he died from pneumonia. It was generally known in the camp that there were many ways in which a prisoner killed in the Political Department was marked as deceased in the records. In the summer of 1943, another prisoner came to the same hospital – Dr. Jan Malinowski, a physician from Radom and my older brother’s friend from university. Dr. Malinowski was summoned to the Political Department in July 1943 and came back beaten up. He told me that he was interrogated by Grabner who ordered SS men to beat him. He was summoned to the Political Department again in November 1943 and beaten again on Grabner’s orders. Dr. Malinowski died in the winter of 1945/1946.
When I was detained in the camp in Birkenau, I became well acquainted with Oberaufseherin [senior overseer] Mandl. One time in June 1944, a prisoner whose name I no longer remember and I were walking down the main road which went along the subsequent sections of the camp. By the gate to section BIIc, next to a Blockführerstube [guardroom], I noticed Maria Mandl and some prisoner I did not know. Mandl was hitting the prisoner with some small object that I was not able to identify. She was hitting her from above, almost on the top of the head. This characteristic method of beating – used by a woman on another woman, no less – stuck in my mind. When the prisoner staggered and collapsed, Mandl repeatedly kicked the woman with her boots and shoved her.
At this the report was concluded, read out, and signed.