Warsaw, 12 October 1948. Judge Halina Wereńko, member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, interviewed the person named below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for giving false testimony, the witness testified as follows:
Name and surname | Ignacy Pisarek |
Names of parents | Paweł and Marianna née Zielińska |
Date of birth | 20 July 1890, Białobrzegi |
Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
Education | can read and write |
Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
Place of residence | Białobrzegi, Nieporęt district |
Occupation | farmer |
My property in Białobrzegi is located opposite the barracks. In the early autumn of 1941 – I cannot remember the exact date – German soldiers brought over the first batch of Soviet POWs from the direction of Zejno. The camp in the barracks had existed up until the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. I never ventured beyond the wires; I could only watch from the outside. I saw a group of Italian POWs arrive in 1943. Around that time, I could also see Russians. I always saw prisoners being marched to the camp. The walking prisoners were very weak and would fall on the way, and the Germans finished them off. There were carts moving behind the walking prisoners and picking up the dead, sometimes giving the weak a lift.
The mortality rate at the camp was high: I saw carts removing a couple dozen or a couple hundred corpses daily. I also saw graves being dug in Winna Góra, some 200 meters from the camp. They were being dug by the POWs. They would prepare a big grave, then pour some soil on the corpses brought over the course of a single day, and in subsequent days, they would fill the pit with layers of corpses all the way up to ground level. There are a couple dozen graves, some containing a couple hundred bodies, some a couple dozen or less. The Germans said that some 30,000 Soviet POWs had died in the camp.
I heard stories that in the camp, there were a couple of incidents when prisoners ate meat from the corpses of their comrades and were punished with death for it.
Many times, I saw German guards beat the prisoners.
At that the report was concluded and read out.