On 21 February 1947 in Kraków, a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, District Investigating Judge Jan Sehn, acting 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 Article 255, 107 and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, interviewed the person specified below as a witness, who testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Samuel Stoeger |
| Date and place of birth | 14 May 1911, Kraków |
| Parents’ names | Majer and Matylda |
| Religion | Jewish |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Occupation | miller |
| Place of residence | Kraków, Kalwaryjska Street 63, flat 5 |
During the occupation I lost my whole family of 13 people, including my wife and child. Within that time I went through the Kraków ghetto, camp in Płaszów, camp in Pionki, then camps in Auschwitz, Gliwice and Blechhammer.
I arrived at the concentration camp in Auschwitz in a group transport from Pionki. We were unloaded in Birkenau on 29 July 1944. The number of people in the transport was 2,500. On the railway ramp, women with children were separated from men who were fit for work. Old men were grouped with women and children.
I stayed in the camp in Birkenau only for a few days. More than a thousand people were crammed in a barrack located near the Gypsy camp. Having gone through the usual admission procedure, that is: after I was bathed, tattooed, and registered, I was assigned to a group of about 1,500 prisoners, who were then transported by trucks to a subcamp in Gliwice, officially called Gliwice I.
Prisoners in this camp worked at rolling stock repair shops (Reichsbahnausbesserungswerkes, RAW). There were a dozen or so – I think 14 – barracks in this camp. It was clean and neatly organized because it was funded by the RAW. There were already several dozen Poles and several dozen Russians in the camp. When we arrived there, Otto Moll was head of the camp. He held this function in Gliwice until the mid-December 1944, when he was transferred again to the central office in Auschwitz. I do not remember the surname of his successor.
The camp was located about one and a half kilometers from the repair shops in which we worked. Prisoners would start their working day by waking up at 4.00 a.m. At 5.00 we would leave for work and start working at 6.00 at our workplace. The labor lasted until 5.00 p.m. with a half-hour break from 12.30 to 1.00 p.m. About 15 minutes of this break was used up by a dinner-time roll call. The camp orchestra would play as we were leaving for work and coming back; above the main gate to the camp was the sign "Arbeit macht frei" [work sets you free]. We carried out our tasks under direct supervision of the SS men from the camp crew. They abused prisoners during work, beating them for the most trivial reasons, usually for no reason at all. If a prisoner was late for an assembly, fell asleep during work, or left the factory hall to relieve himself, this was treated as an attempt to escape, and such a person was shot by the SS men on the spot. I remember an incident when the SS men found a prisoner who had fallen asleep earlier because he was tired. They beat him up in a very brutal manner, then dragged him out of the front of the column of prisoners who were walking back from work, and shot him. He was a young Hungarian man. We had to carry his corpse to the camp and bathe it in the washroom.
The food was insufficient, especially since some of our portions were stolen by the prisoner functionaries, so the majority of us suffered from Durchfall [diarrhea]. On average, 300 prisoners out of 1,500 would be sick. The mortality rate reached 30 deaths per week. The corpses were transported to the crematoria in Auschwitz. The dead were replaced with new prisoners sent to the camp, so that the total number of prisoners was always about 1,500.
Prisoners who were unfit for work in the repair shops because of an illness or physical exhaustion were made to stay and carry out work inside the camp. With regular monthly intervals, SS men from Auschwitz, including an SS doctor, would come to the camp and conduct selections, that is choose those of us who were unfit for work. Those who worked inside the camp and usually all prisoners in the hospital were the first to be selected. The selected prisoners were then transported to Auschwitz and gassed. They were replaced by newly transported prisoners.
German foremen who supervised our work in the repair shops would report us to the camp authorities for the most trivial offences committed during work, such as trying to get warm by the radiator or eating some scraps found somewhere. Based on these reports, Moll organized the "payment", that is the punishment of flogging, every Sunday at noon. It was administered on two sawbuck tables built specially for this purpose. The floggings were carried out by the designated prisoner functionaries or SS men. The usual punishment was 50 lashes. Moll personally passed sentences, while in more serious cases the central office at Auschwitz issued a written verdict.
On Sundays and holidays we didn’t work at the repair shops. However, prisoners couldn’t rest on these days, because they had to carry stones to the camp from a place located about one and a half kilometers away. These stones were used for levelling the camp terrain. Physically weak prisoners cleaned the toilet holes during that time. They carried buckets with excrement from the latrines to the local meadows. The naked corpses of the prisoners shot during an alleged escape attempt were placed in the roll call square on top of a specially prepared table. Next to it was a sign stating that the man on the table had been shot while he was trying to escape, and that the same fate awaited all prisoners who would try to escape.
During my detention, nine Russians and two Poles escaped from Gliwice I camp. They got beyond the camp fence through a passage which they had dug underground in a very laborious and resourceful manner, and ran away. A few days later two Russians were caught. They were marched around the camp with the following signs hung on their person: "Hurra, hurra, wir sind wieder da" [Hooray, hooray, we are back]. Several days afterwards, two trucks drove up to the camp. A platoon of SS men in helmets got out of the first truck, and two sets of portable gallows were unloaded from the second. They were set up in front of the roll call square and the two Russian escapees who had been captured were hanged. They both behaved very bravely. The execution took place during the evening roll call, and all prisoners assembled at roll call had to watch. For better visibility, prisoners in the first line were sitting down, those behind them were on their knees and those at the back were standing.
Moll would personally shoot prisoners for most trivial offences. He once caught me boiling potatoes which I had been given at the repair shop. He assumed that I stole them from the camp warehouse and didn’t believe my explanations. He beat me up and knocked me around, set the dog on me, and then told me to run "for freedom" ("Lauf auf die Freiheit!"), pointing to the wired fence around the camp. When I refused, he threatened me with a revolver. Having no choice, I ran up to the wires and started climbing. Four shots were immediately fired from the guard tower. None of them hit me. At almost exact same moment Moll’s deputy drove by. He supervised our work in the repair shops and knew that I was a hardworking man. He pleaded with Moll on my behalf and saved me from death. Such incidents were very frequent, the day before my incident Moll shot two of my friends from Kraków in that manner. One of them was called Zygmunt Strum.
Apart from Polish Jews, Poles, and Russians, prisoners in the camp in Gliwice included French, Dutch, Belgian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovakian Jews, as well as one American and one Turkish Jew. 90 percent of the prisoners were Jewish. During my stay in the camp, so in the span of less than half a year, the camp claimed about 1,500 lives due to selections and "natural" deaths. It follows that within that time almost the entire camp population was replaced. At the end of my stay in the camp, very few people from the transport in which I had arrived were still alive.
The camp was closed on 18 January 1945. On that day all prisoners able to march, even the sick who had to be supported by colleagues, were herded through the city of Koźle to the camp in Blechhammer. Everyone unable to march further was shot by the SS men on the way. The majority of the victims died when the transport was going through the forest. The SS men threw the corpses of the people who had been shot into the ditches on the side of the road. We got to Blechhammer after three days of marching. Not once during these three days were we given a hot meal.
Shortly after we were detained in the camp in Blechhammer, the SS men scattered away, dumped their weapons, and changed into civilian clothes or even striped prison uniforms, so we realized that we were close to being liberated.
I would like to point out that the function of kapo was held in the camp in Gliwice by common criminals from Germany. Peter (I don’t remember his name), who had been detained 12 years in various camps for murdering his own family, was Oberkapo [senior kapo]. Kapo Neumann was his deputy – he was also a common criminal and a former circus clown.
The report was read out. At this the hearing and the following report were concluded.