Dr Ludwik Edward Witkowski

The local community of Radom has put up a plaque on the wall of Saint Casimir’s Municipal Hospital to commemorate Dr Ludwik Edward Witkowski and several other members of the hospital’s staff, honouring the merit and dedicated service of their healthcare workers who contributed a memorable chapter to the history of Poland’s battle against German Nazism.

Dr Ludwik Edward Witkowski was the hospital’s head since 1937. Straight after Germany invaded Poland, Dr Witkowski, who was chief surgeon of Radom at the time, joined the secret resistance organization Służba Zwycięstwu Polski (Service for Poland’s Victory), the seed of what would later develop into Związek Walki Zbrojnej (the Union of Armed Struggle) and Armia Krajowa (the Home Army).¹ From the close of 1939 until his arrest by the Gestapo on 21 January1941, Dr Witkowski served as the medical chief physician of the Radom district, a regional area of the Home Army.²

Dr Ludwik Edward Witkowski. Source: Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1971.

Ludwik Edward Witkowski was born in Yekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk)³ on 18 October 1897. His father was a bookkeeper. Until 1914 his sons attended Chyrów School.⁴ Ludwik continued his education at the Wojciech Górski Grammar School in Warsaw,⁵ which he finished in 1917 and in the same year went up to the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Warsaw. The outbreak of the First World War interrupted his studies. He volunteered for the 4th Uhlan Regiment,⁶ in which he served for about a year. Later he served in medical units. He was in the army until 1 January 1921⁷ and afterwards re-enrolled at the University of Warsaw for Medicine. He graduated on 28 March 1925.

He specialized in surgery. For eight years, from 1 April 1925 to 1 February 1933, he continued his education, developing his surgical skills in the Second Surgical Clinic of the University of Warsaw under the guidance of Prof. Dr Zygmunt Radliński⁸ [a well-known surgeon and student of Prof. B. Kadera; he trained many distinguished surgeons].⁹ Next, he was appointed head of the surgical department at Saint Catherine’s Municipal Hospital in Radom. He made a name for himself as an excellent surgeon, a good organizer, a kind-hearted colleague, a talented teacher, a man of many virtues but always humble. His focus on surgery was no obstacle to a broad outlook on general medical matters. In 1926, Dr Witkowski joined the Polish Medical Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie)¹⁰ and he strove to improve sanitary conditions in the local community. He usually spent his holidays in the remote village of Steklin in the Powiat¹¹ of Lipno, fully committed to providing free medical treatment for its inhabitants.

On 1 September 1939, he was mobilised and assigned to work as a second lieutenant physician in Skarżysko-Kamienna hospital. When the hospital was evacuated, he marched east¹² with its staff. However, he did not leave the country but returned to Radom on 10 October 1939. Straight after arriving, he went back to work as head of the municipal hospital, totally absorbed by his professional activities and work for the resistance movement. He was very popular with the hospital’s staff and patients. Despite the very bad conditions under German occupation, he ran the hospital efficiently and was a good leader for the junior staff, offering help and advice, and medical assistance whenever necessary. He treated and saved the lives of Polish soldiers and officers hiding from the Germans, as well as of underground resistance men still with not much combat experience and of Jewish persons. He was good at dodging orders issued by the SS Stadthauptmann (city governor), and secretly obtaining medications and dressings for the POW hospital. He also helped those who had been displaced from the territories incorporated in Germany.¹³ He managed to employ many doctors, interns and medical assistants desperate for any job they could find.¹⁴ He hid Polish army uniforms, weapons that had not been handed in to the Germans, radio sets,¹⁵ and even a walkie-talkie in the storage facilities of the infectious diseases hospital. His surgical ward admitted people on the Gestapo’s wanted list, even performing sham surgeries to provide a pretext to keep them in hospital.

Not surprisingly, the Gestapo operating in Radom was carefully watching his activities. Even though he received a warning that he would be arrested, he did not go into hiding, because it would have meant reprisals against his wife and three children. He was arrested along with a group of about 500 residents of Radom and its environs, on charges of belonging to the resistance movement. They were jailed first in Skarżysko-Kamienna, where the Gestapo brutally interrogated them. In late February, most of them were sent to Auschwitz. Hardly any of them survived.

There is only one mention of Dr Witkowski in the archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.¹⁶ The Auschwitz Zugangsliste (arrivals list) has an entry for 25 February 1941 for the registration of a prisoner-doctor as number 10561. That was Ludwik Edward Witkowski’s prison number. There are only a few accounts of what happened to him in Auschwitz, testified by fellow inmates who survived. Dr Kazimierz Hałgas, one of the veteran prisoner-doctors working in the Auschwitz prisoners’ hospital, whose duties included attending incoming prisoners, remembers the arrival of this particular transport from Radom. They were assembled in the Bekleindungs-Kammer (clothes room). Dr Hałgas was an eye witness of the following incident:

Just after the evening roll call a Blocksperre (barrack curfew) was announced. Next, all the prisoners (hundreds of them) from the Radom transport were led out to the lane running between Blocks 14 and 19.¹⁷ They were lined up and told that the whole group would be decimated because of some incident that had happened in Radom (supposedly it was the killing of an SS man). However, the guards did not select every tenth prisoner, only the first five rows, that is 25 men. These were ordered to march off, and a firing squad followed them. A volley of shots was fired (that was the method of execution still used at the time). After the departure of the firing squad, the rest of the prisoners were sent to the penal company, where they had green triangles (the badge for criminals, thieves and pimps) sewn on their prison gear; a few days later these badges were replaced with red triangles.¹⁸ The block leader of the Straf-Kompanie (penal company) was Krankemann,¹⁹ one of the most brutal scoundrels and torturers in Auschwitz. He did not allow anyone from his company to be admitted to the prison hospital. He or a male nurse called “Czerwony Jakub” killed all the sick and disabled inmates. Both enjoyed strangling and kicking prisoners until they died. Despite these dramatic circumstances, Dr Witkowski managed to leave the penal company. It was possible thanks to the hospital kapo Hans Bock²⁰ (camp no. 5), who managed to bribe Krankemann. More precisely, it was thanks to a brave effort on the part of the Polish staff of the prisoners’ hospital (Hałgas).

Jan Pakowski, another prisoner-doctor (camp no. 8633), who worked in the infectious diseases ward of the prisoners’ hospital, also met Dr Witkowski, and this is how he remembers him:

At the time the SS doctors forced me to breed body lice taken from patients with epidemic typhus; the lice were to be fed on the blood of healthy prisoners. We could only use prisoners from the prisoners’ hospital for this experiment. If a lice feeder became infected with typhus and recovered, he left the penal company. The prisoner-doctors applied a special treatment to the infected lice which killed them before they could get to a feeder’s blood. As a result, none of the prisoners contracted epidemic typhus, but their medical records made them out to be infected, with temperature and pulse charts showing the typical course of epidemic typhus. We used this method to save inmates, including Dr Witkowski. Those were the circumstances in which we met. His hospitalisation as an infected lice feeder was prolonged, and unofficially he helped us treat patients in the typhus block. I remember Dr Witkowski as a calm and self-possessed person, not anxious about his own fate, even though he was certainly aware of the difficult situation he was in. (Pakowski)

Dr Stanisław Suliborski, another prisoner-doctor of the infectious diseases ward in the Auschwitz prisoners’ hospital (camp no. 2876), released from the camp on 10 February 1942, also came in touch with Dr Witkowski in 1941. His account contains the following information:

When the first cases of epidemic typhus were reported in a transport of prisoners from Lublin, the epidemic spread all over Auschwitz, which forced the camp’s authorities to add another barrack to the hospital to isolate infected inmates. It was a single-storey barrack, Number 12 (in the old numbering), later changed to Block 10, adjacent to the yard of Block 13, which was later numbered 11, Death Block.

I was assigned to run the ward; the other prisoner-doctors were Jan Pakowski and Okoński; there were also male nurses Stefan Rogada, Czesław Wasiłowski, Józef Lewandowski, Leon Turalski, Szaniawski and others. The block was fairly spacious, so the camp authorities allowed us to admit patients from the penal company who had managed to get into the prisoners’ hospital, regardless of what they were actually ill with. The first two rooms on either side of the corridor closest to the entrance were designated for these patients. I have written “who managed to get into” because as a rule the block elders²¹ of the penal company did not allow their men to go to the hospital’s dispensary, where they could get provisional medical assistance or might be qualified for admission.

One day in May 1941, Dr Władysław Dering,²² who was head of the dispensary and admissions, informed me that there would be two physicians, L. E. Witkowski and J. Gałka, in a group of new admissions from the penal company. He asked me to take special care of Dr Witkowski. They had known each other for years and Dr Dering must have put a lot of effort into overcoming all the stumbling blocks in the complicated admission procedure for him. Also, he might have learnt that Dr Witkowski and his assistant, Dr Gałka, were in the penal company because the staff of the dispensary had assisted in receiving new prisoners.

Although Drs Witkowski and Gałka were extremely emaciated, they were not in such a bad shape considering the appalling camp conditions. They were allocated the top bunk in the room to the left of the entrance. They gradually got used to the hospital conditions and, with good medical assistance provided by the staff and extra food, they were recovering little by little. The staff did their best to extend their stay in the hospital for as long as possible. But staying in the hospital was not exactly a whale of a time, because of the close neighbourhood of the penal company’s yard, where every day the SS men indulged in drunken orgies, violence and brutal killings of prisoners. The windows of the rooms on the right of the entrance faced this yard, and although they were blacked out, through the cracks in the paint it was still possible to observe and hear the noise of the macabre scenes going on there. Those with nerves of steel could watch and then pass on their observations to others. The atmosphere in the ward was very depressing, especially for patients from the penal company, who knew that their return to this hell on earth was only a matter of time. On several occasions we were ordered to discharge these prisoners from the hospital regardless of their condition. It usually concerned Jewish inmates. Fortunately, the camp authorities did not call for Witkowski or Gałka. However, eventually the day of their discharge came—it was in July 1941.

Block 12 was being closed down, and so were the rooms for the penal company prisoners. Both prisoner-doctors returned to the penal company in a good condition physically. At the same time, thanks to our “influence” even on the kapos of this commando, we were assured they would spare our protégés unless they received an order of the SS authorities to be hard on them.

There was a custom that if a prisoner endured six months in the penal company, he would be released from hard labour in it and sent back to the camp. Perhaps it was due to some regulations, but I am not sure. The fact is that transfers from the penal company to other blocks did occur and were associated with a kind of ceremony, in the presence of the camp’s acting commandant Fritzsch²³ himself.

After a relatively short stay in the penal company, including their treatment in the prisoners’ hospital, Witkowski and Gałka were officially sent to work in the hospital. Dr Witkowski was assigned to Block 21 (surgery). Dr Gałka joined the staff of Block 20 (infectious diseases), becoming one of my bravest and most dedicated co-workers. Dr Witkowski used to visit us from time to time. He was not allowed to work in the operating theatre, so he could not use his surgical expertise in the service of those in need of it. He felt sorry about this situation. Drs Witkowski and Gałka had red circles sewn on the back of their prison gear, apart from their camp numbers and red triangles (the insignia of their suffering), worn on the left breast. The red circle meant that they were not allowed to work outside the camp and that they belonged to a group of prisoners under special scrutiny. Yet, after their appalling experiences in the penal company, they were working in a more “peaceful” block, with a big chance for survival.

On 15 October 1941, news came like a bolt from the blue that Dr Witkowski was put in a group of Jewish prisoners due to be shot that day and killed with them (Suliborski).

There is no document confirming the date of Dr Witkowski’s death in the Archive of the Auschwitz State Museum, nor is his camp photo there. Although the 1941 mortuary book is extant, there is no entry in it on 15 October 1941 for a prisoner registered as number 10561. Presumably Dr Witkowski’s body was taken straight from the execution site to the crematorium, bypassing the mortuary. His execution must have been performed by the Rapportführer (report officer), Oberscharführer SS Gerhard Palitzsch, the notorious Auschwitz murderer.²⁴

For a certain period of time, Dr Witkowski’s family received his letters from the camp, but they were lost during the Warsaw Uprising.²⁵ Dr Witkowski’s wife received a notification of her husband’s death from the Gestapo’s headquarters in Aleja Szucha in Warsaw. She was summoned and told that her husband had “died of heart disease” on 15 October 1941. Later she learned unofficially from some Auschwitz survivors who had been released still under German occupation that her husband had been shot.

***

Translated from original article: Kłodziński, S. “Dr Ludwik Edward Witkowski.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1971.

1. ZWZ, Związek Walki Zbrojnej, (Union of Armed Struggle), an early Polish resistance organisation, predecessor of the AK (Armia Krajowa, the Home Army), the largest underground resistance movement in occupied Europe during the Second World War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Armed_Struggle and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Army^a
2. The Home Army had a membership of up to 380 thousand at its peak in the summer of 1944. It was divided geographically into regional branches or areas (obszar), which were subdivided into sub-regions or sub-areas (podokręg) or independent areas (okręgi samodzielne). There were 89 inspectorates (inspektorat) and 280 districts (obwód) as of early 1944, which were smaller administrative units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Army#Regions^b
3. This city is now called Dnipro, and it is in eastern Ukraine.^a
4. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Chyrów was a prestigious Jesuit college for boys. It resumed activities after the war, and continued them until the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. The place is now called Khyriv and is in western Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_School_in_Chyr%C3%B3w^a
5. A prestigious grammar school in Warsaw, originally a six-year secondary school transformed in 1905 transformed into a grammar school; founded in 1877 by the distinguished educator Wojciech Górski (1849-1935).^c
6. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Poland was not an independent country, but had been partitioned between three neighbouring states, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, since the late 18th century. So presumably in 1914 DrWitkowski joined the forces of one of the Partitioning Powers, most probably Russia. However, when Poland recovered its independence in 1918, he served in the Polish Army.^a
7. Dr Witkowski was not demobilised until 1921, presumably because he continued to serve in the Polish Army during the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1919-1921. The original Polish article, which was published under the People's Republic of Poland, leaves this fact unsaid. At the time of its publication, Poland was in the Soviet Bloc and its censorship authority banned all mention of that war in published materials, and especially of the fact that Soviet Russia invaded the newly restored Polish State.^a
8. Zygmunt Radliński (1874-1941), an eminent Polish surgeon. During World War I, he worked in military hospitals. At the end of the war, he became chief surgeon of Ujazdowski Hospital in Warsaw. In 1920 he became a professor of surgery at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Warsaw; he was head of the Department of Surgery and the Surgical Clinic at the Infant Jesus Hospital. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Radli%C5%84ski^b
9. Information in square brackets originally appeared in a footnote in the source text.^d
10. An error appears to have crept into the original Polish text. Dr Witkowski could not have been a member of the Polish Medical Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie) in 1926, because it was only founded in 1951. Most probably the author meant Warszawskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie (the Warsaw Medical Society), which was founded in 1820.^b
11. A powiat is the second-tier unit in the territorial division of Poland into administrative and local government regions.^b
12. World War Two started in the early hours of 1 September 1939 when German troops invaded Poland. The Polish Army instructed men who wanted to enlist to move east, but on 17 September Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. The Polish government and many senior officers and army units left the country to set up a government-in-exile and a military force abroad.^a
13. When Germany invaded and occupied Poland in 1939, it annexed the western part of the country, which it called “Reichsgau Wartheland,” incorporated this territory in the German Reich, and displaced the Polish and Jewish inhabitants to the Generalgouvernement (i.e. the rest of the Polish territories under German occupation).^a
14. Under German occupation, any Pole who was unemployed was liable to deportation to Germany for slave labour. The Germans deported about 2.5—3.5 Polish citizens for slave labour in Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II^a
15. Under the German occupation of Poland, it was illegal for Poles even to own a radio set, and the “offence” was punishable by deportation to a concentration camp or even by death. https://sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/o-sprawiedliwych/kim-sa-sprawiedliwi/kara-smierci-za-udzielanie-pomocy-zydom^a
16. Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi German concentration camps and extermination centres. The remains left of the camp are preserved in the Museum created in 1947. http://auschwitz.org/en/^b
17. The original author employs a numeration of Auschwitz blocks used broadly at the time of his writing (1941).^e
18. Political prisoners and Poles confined in Auschwitz wore a red triangular badge.^b
19. Ernst Krankemann (1895–1941), an infamous Kapo at Auschwitz. A German criminal, he was sent to Auschwitz on 29 August 1940. Although generally disliked by the SS, Krankemann had powerful supporters such as Karl Fritzsch, camp leader and deputy of camp commandant Rudolf Höss. Kapo Krankemann exercised considerable power, including the power to kill. On 28 July 1941, Krankemann and about 500 other inmates were sent to Sonnenstein near Dresden on the 14f13 adult euthanasia programme. They were the first Auschwitz inmates to be gassed, though not in Auschwitz itself. An alternative story appears in the report compiled by Capt. Witold Pilecki, according to which Krankemann was lynched by prisoners after he had boarded the train for Sonnenstein, while the SS guards who had encouraged prisoners to take their revenge on Krankemann turned a blind eye to what was going on. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Krankemann and “Raport Witolda” in the Files section at https://www.miastochojnice.pl^b
20. Hans Bock (“Tata,” camp number 5), a criminal and morphine addict. Arrived in Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen and held the post of supervisor in the prisoners’ hospital. Transferred to the Łagisza sub-camp for drug addiction, where he died in 1944.^b
21. A block elder (Blockälteste, also translated as “block senior” or “senior block inmate”) was an SS-appointed prisoner responsible for the barrack or block, with disciplinary powers over other prisoners; he reported to the block leader, an SS man subordinate to the Rapportführer (report leader) responsible for everyday operations of a designated section of a concentration camp, such as holding roll calls, dividing prisoners into work groups and overseeing the labour performed by the Arbeitskommandos.^b
22. Dr W&#322;adys&#322;aw Dering (1903–1965), Auschwitz prisoner doctor and survivor, on orders of the camp&rsquo;s authorities castrated male prisoners and sterilised women prisoners. For more details, see Maria Ciesielska, &ldquo;&bdquo;Operacje eksperymentalne by&#322;y przyczyn&#261; mojego smutku i&nbsp;wstr&#281;tu&hellip;&rdquo; Losy W&#322;adys&#322;awa Deringa w&nbsp;&#347;wietle zachowanych dokument&oacute;w.&rdquo; <em>Ciemno&#347;ci kryj&#261; ziemi&#281;. Wybrane aspekty bada&#324; i&nbsp;nauczania o&nbsp;Holokau&#347;cie. </em>Martyna Gr&#261;dzka-Rejak and Piotr Troja&#324;ski (eds.), D&#281;blin: Lotnicza Akademia Wojskowa, 2019, p. 189-212, and&nbsp;Maria Ciesielska, &ldquo;W&#322;adys&#322;aw Dering i&nbsp;Jan Grabczy&#324;ski &ndash; lekarze wi&#281;&#378;niowie w&nbsp;Auschwitz,&rdquo; <em>Nowa Medycyna</em> 2019 (26: 2), p. 70-76.^f
23. Karl Fritzsch (1903- reported missing 1945), deputy- and an acting commandant of Auschwitz. The camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss claimed that Fritzsch was the first to suggest using Zyklon B poison gas for mass murder. Fritzsch quickly obtained a gruesome reputation for torture and murder. His name is misspelled in the original Polish article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Fritzsch^b
24. This SS man was born in Grossopitz near Tharandt on 17 June 1913; he was shot in Hungary on 7 December 1944 (Ścisło, 29).^c
25. The Warsaw Uprising of the summer of 1944, not to be confused with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1043.^a

a—notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; b—Translator’s notes; c—notes translated from the original Polish article; d—Website Editor’s note; e—note courtesy of Teresa Wontor-Cichy, Expert Consultant for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; f—note by Maria Ciesielska, Expert Consultant and Vice-Director of the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

A publication funded in 2020–2021 within the DIALOG Program of the Ministry of Education and Science in Poland.