On 6 December 1947 in Nowy Sącz, Deputy Prosecutor from the Seventh Region of the Prosecutor’s Office of the District Court in Nowy Sącz with its seat in Nowy Sącz, K. Gołębiewski (MA), with the participation of a reporter, court registrar Jan Lesicki, pursuant to Article 20 of the provisions introducing the Code of Criminal Procedure, heard the person named below as a witness, without taking an oath. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Lucjan Górka |
| Age | 63 years old |
| Parents’ names | Mieczysław and Maria |
| Place of residence | Nowy Sącz, Rynek Street 30 |
| Occupation | shopkeeper |
| Criminal record | none |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
On 19 July 1941 I was arrested by the Gestapo in Nowy Sącz and incarcerated in the local prison. Two weeks later, I was transported from the prison in Nowy Sącz to the prison in Tarnów. Shortly afterwards, I was deported together with other prisoners from Tarnów to the Auschwitz camp.
Upon admission to the Auschwitz camp, just like all the other prisoners, I was examined, or rather reviewed, by a doctor. This examination looked as follows: the prisoners were gathered in the washroom and ordered to raise their arms, and the doctor inspected them from a distance of a few steps. The doctor who was on duty on the day of our arrival decided, judging by my appearance only, that I suffered from an umbilical hernia, and he made a note to that effect in my card. Some time later, I was summoned to the camp hospital, when it was announced to me that I would be operated on. When I didn’t want the operation, claiming that my hernia was not bothering me in the slightest, some German doctor whose surname I don’t recall declared that he would perform the surgery simply because he had never performed such an operation before. Indeed, I was operated on by that doctor in the presence of a Polish doctor, Dr. Dering. I was operated on without narcosis, only with local anesthetic. This German doctor didn’t know how to perform the operation. Then, Dr. Dering himself made the cut and removed my hernia, and the German doctor sewed the hernia up.
For some time after the operation I remained at the surgical ward. At the time when I stayed at the hospital, the selections of prisoners were taking place. Usually, the nurse Klehr, and sometimes also the German doctor Entrest, would choose from among the sick also those people who were recovering after various surgical procedures, and these sick people were transferred to block 20, where the so-called Pflegers [nurses] were administering lethal injections.
When I could walk again, I was moved to the block of the so-called convalescents. There were about 2,000 sick people there, and they were supposed to be mending socks. I saw that among those “convalescents” some people were so sick that they could not get up unassisted. There were also some people who had pieces of their bodies falling away due to frostbite. On 12 March 1942, at around 11.00 p.m., a resident of Nowy Sącz, Mieczysław Dębowski, came to me and told me that on the following day the entire block in which I stayed would be moved to Birkenau. He advised me to obtain release from the sickroom and volunteer for work in the camp. I told the news to a few of my friends who were with me in the sickroom. Acting on Dębowski’s advice, we reported for work.
On the following day, that is, on 13 March 1942, all sick people were indeed transferred to the newly established camp in Birkenau. The prisoners were issued uniforms of the murdered Russian POWs. Those who were not too ill put them on themselves. As for those who couldn’t get dressed on their own, I helped them, together with 15 other companions in misery who reported for work along with me. The camp in Birkenau was situated some three kilometers from Auschwitz. Those who were strong enough went there on foot. The ones who couldn’t keep to their feet were carried out by us to the street in front of the block. I remember that there were some 400–800 people who were so gravely ill. These sick people remained lying on the ground for several hours, although the temperature dropped to minus 19 degrees and there was a strong wind. About 400 of these people had died as a result of the cold even before they were taken to Birkenau. Later on, several hundred more dead people were brought from Birkenau; these were the people who died during the transport from Auschwitz. I know from what the former prosecutor in Nowy Sącz, Wiktor Mordaski, told me, that all the prisoners who had then been transported from Auschwitz to Birkenau as sick or went there on their own, had to take a bath in barrels filled with cold water and placed in the field in front of the blocks before they were allowed to enter the block. As a result of this bath taken in freezing temperature (minus 19 degrees), out of 2,000 people who stayed with me in the sickroom, only 40 remained alive, including prosecutor Mordarski.
In April 1942, the first transport of women arrived at Auschwitz, comprising a few thousand women of various nationalities. I saw that in order to finish them off, these women were driven to work barefooted, even though it was sleeting. The results of this were horrible, as nearly the entire transport caught a cold and perished.
In October 1944 I was transported together with other prisoners from Auschwitz to Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen. In Oranienburg I met Wróblewski, a former student of medicine in Warsaw if I am not mistaken. I learned from him that he had stayed in Auschwitz from 1941. During our conversation, Wróblewski asked me to try and remember the facts that he wanted to tell me and which he had witnessed as a medical man and assistant to Dr. Kramer and Dr. Weber in the experiments that they carried out in Auschwitz. He told me that the above named German doctors, allegedly in order to establish what changes occur in the human organism during sexual intercourse, usually forced a Jew and a Jewess to engage in sexual intercourse in their presence, in the laboratory room. At the moment when the man was about to ejaculate or reach orgasm, both the man and the woman were shot in the back of the head and their spines were immediately cut out and then the spinal column was subjected to tests. This medical man Wróblewski told me that indeed the changes in the spinal column were visible as if on a canvas. Wróblewski claimed that he told me this because we couldn’t know which of us would survive, and he wanted these facts to be disclosed in the future. The block in which these experiments were carried out was always closed and entering it verged on the impossible. Wróblewski was present during these experiments in the capacity of a Pfleger [nurse] – assistant to Dr. Kramer and Dr. Weber. The same Wróblewski told me that he had witnessed artificial insemination of women in the Auschwitz camp. For a longer period of time, these experiments didn’t yield any results. Finally, when the above-named doctors managed to artificially inseminate a woman, they gave vent to their joy by organizing an orgy of drunkenness with the SS men. Wróblewski came from Warsaw, and he told me that his parents owned a villa in some seaside town near Gdynia. I don’t recall the name of that place. I don’t know whether Wróblewski is still alive and I don’t know his present fate.
In the summer of 1942, I witnessed the hanging of two young Polish boys, who were condemned to death for repeated escape attempts from labor in Germany. These boys were hanged in the presence of the entire camp as well as Aumeier and Grabner. When one of these boys begged to be spared, Aumeier – beaming with joy – replied, "Bald wirst du tanzen" [you will soon dance]. A moment later both boys were hanged from the gallows.
On 19 July 1943 I witnessed an execution by hanging of 12 engineers. I saw that one of them – a son of an engineer from Nowy Sącz, Józef Wojtyga – couldn’t reach the noose due to his short height, and then Aumeier himself helped to lift that man so that a noose could be fastened around his neck. A few days earlier, a group of 13 Polish engineers had been shot. Grabner was present at these executions and he was the one who gave the orders. The best people were then executed. All of them were chosen by Grabner.