Andrija Kollin, a merchant from Čakovec, 42 years old, a Jew, makes a testimony before the Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes for the town and district of Čakovec, which concerns his stay in a German concentration camp and the treatment of the prisoners by the Germans. He testified as follows:
I was incarcerated in the camp in Jawiszowice near Kraków, some five to six kilometers from Auschwitz, from 22 May 1944 to 1 February 1945.
At the time there were 3,500 people in that camp, but I was the only prisoner from Međimurje. All the rest were Hungarians.
We were treated in a criminal way which defies description. We performed the hardest labor in the mine, we were forced to work from dawn to dusk, and we didn’t receive any cooked meals, but only 2 deciliters of black coffee and 6 decagrams of bread in the morning and three fourths of a liter of turnip soup (or similar) with 6 decagrams of bread in the evening. As a result of the above, the prisoners grew so thin that they would lose several dozen kilograms in weight, and due to exhaustion and insufficient food, people were dying by the hundreds.
Moreover, the guards who escorted us to work and oversaw us beat us every day: with hands, rifle butts, and rubber batons, and kicked and beat us in all ways imaginable, so as a result – as far as I know – about 25 people died.
It was said that the guards who did all this were Germans from Bačka and Banat, and we could also guess by their accent that they were not from the Reich.
We lived in wooden barracks in the cold, but the hygienic conditions were not that bad, as the Germans themselves were careful to preserve the workforce.
I couldn’t even describe in detail the appearance of particular guards who were responsible for the bloodshed – and these were boys, 17-year-olds – because the terror was such that we didn’t have any contact with them.