When they had finished and sent me back to a cell, I couldn’t feel my right leg below the knee. The wound was closed with crude stitches, sewn on like a piece of cloth. Through the thin concrete wall of the next cell, I heard a Polish woman crying. Her name was Wanda Poltavska. She was twenty years old and had already undergone six operations in Ward 47.
She told me that about 74 Polish women were being used for experiments. German doctors were testing treatments for infected wounds, bone grafts, and the survival time of bloodless limbs. They were using us because Nazi ideology classified Slavs as “subhuman,” worthless lives whose sacrifice was meant to help wounded “Aryan” soldiers.
I met other people: Maria Kusmerchuk, whose legs had been amputated for gas gangrene tests; Edviga Dzida, whose feet were encrusted with shards of glass and wood to simulate war wounds; and Barbara Pietrzyk, only 16 years old, whose legs were so deformed that she walked like a broken robot. There was also Zofia Monczka, used for sterilization tests by radiation.
I was taken back to room 47 five times. They took a muscle sample from my thigh, injected me with the tetanus vaccine to observe spasms, and tested the limits of the bleeding. By the fifth time, I had a systemic infection. The doctor ordered his assistants to “get rid of” me in the terminal ward.
I should have died there, but Wanda convinced a Polish guard to smuggle in some substandard antibiotics. Miraculously, I survived. My fever subsided and the infection cleared up. I would never walk normally again, nor would I ever dance again, but I was alive.
In April 1945, as the Red Army advanced, the Nazis began destroying evidence. Many mutilated women were executed by phenol injection. But in the chaos of the evacuation, we were forgotten. When Soviet soldiers liberated the camp on April 30, 1945, I weighed only 38 kg.
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