camp staff was held in Kraków. The Supreme National Tribunal adjudicated 23 death sentences (21 carried out), 16 sentences from life imprisonment to 3 years, and 1 defendant acquitted. In the course of both trials and the preceding investigations conducted by the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, the largest collection of early court testimonies submitted by survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau was created. Testimonies collected shortly after the war from Jews, Poles, Roma and people of several other nationalities from all over Europe are an invaluable source for learning the history of the camp from the perspective of the prisoners - victims of the German Third Reich.
The testimonies published in the “Chronicles of Terror” contain personal experiences of particular people who experienced the German totalitarian regime. By giving voice to the witnesses and their biographies, we counteract the intentions of the criminals who wanted to reduce the mass extermination to mere statistics. In the accounts, we can learn about the story of Jerzy Bielecki, for instance, who escaped from the camp in July 1944 along with his beloved Jewish woman, Cyla Cybulska. The famous sculptor Xawery Dunikowski talks about his confinement in the camp detention (the so-called bunker), while Jan Reyman, a chemist and football player for Wisła Kraków, speaks of experiments conducted at the SS Institute of Hygiene in Rajsk. Henryk Mandelbaum, a member of the Sonderkommando, describes the extermination of Jews in a harrowing way.
“The burning lasted for 12, 13 or 15 minutes. A transport of 3,000 people, as the commanding officer repeatedly said, had to be burned all at once.” The famous pre-war boxer Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, in turn, recalls one of the selections during which an unexpected incident occurred: “Once, when Fritsch was performing the selection, the priest Kolbe stepped out and sacrificed his life for another.” The witnesses speak of the first transport of Poles from the prison in Tarnów to the camp; selections at the Birkenau ramp; gassing of the Jews and Soviet prisoners of war; murderous work in the sub-camps; pseudo-medical experiments; executions at the “Death Wall”; resistance attempts against the Germans; and escapes from Auschwitz. We perceive all these events from the perspective of the prisoners who describe their experiences in the camp, in the hands of officers of the Third Reich. Although the accounts are descriptions of the victims' experiences, they also tell us a lot about the perpetrators.