(flour, margarine, and eggs) from the storeroom at Prosta Street 12 to a bakery on Muranowska Street. The wagon was convoyed by 2 Jewish employers of the said company. One of them, Rachwalski, said that when the wagon got to the corner of Żelazna and Chłodna streets, it was stopped by gendarme “Frankenstein”, who was on duty at that gate. He questioned them thoroughly about the cargo and origin of the wagon. The escorts produced documents to confirm their employment in that German company and that the said products were its property. The gendarme said that those documents [6] were forged because there was no such company. [He also concluded] that the cargo came from smuggling. The Jewish escorts tried to explain everything to the gendarme, but to no avail. He took them and the wagon to the corner of Chłodna and Wronia streets, where he took out his revolver and said that they would die unless they told him where the smuggled cargo had come from. Rachwalski said that he went through two hours of mortal fear, because Frankenstein was about to shoot them. They survived only by accident—a patrol of German gendarmes with an officer happened to be walking by. When the officer saw Jews on a wagon on the Aryan side he decided to intervene. The matter was sorted out only because the officer knew about the existence of a company called Deutsche Firmengemeinschaft. The wagon driven by the two Jewish escorts finally reached the bakery on Muranowska Street. The whole affair took 2 1/2 hours. But “Frankenstein” did not want to give up his victims so easily. [7] Even after the officer said that the Jews could be let go, the gendarme threatened them, saying that he had to shoot one of them. He asked which one had a bigger family. When he found out that one of them was married and the other was single, he said that he would take mercy on the married one, but he would shoot the bachelor (that is, Rachwalski). Only after tormenting them like that did he release them. It should also be stressed that on that day that gendarme shot the administrator of Elektoralna Street 4, also on suspicion of smuggling.
ARG I 520 (Ring. I/289).
Description: original or duplicate, handwritten, ink, pencil, Polish, 178x215, 152x198 mm, 5 sheets, 7 pages.
