KIVELISHA: The history of Rakovo Camp can be divided into two periods. There was the first which lasted about 2 years and ended in November 1941. At that time the number of prisoners was not very great and consequently the rate of mortality was not so high. Then there was the second period, from November 1941 to March 1942, at which time I was in Rakovo myself. During this second period the mortality rate was exceptionally high: there were days when 700, 900, and even 950 persons died in the camp.
COL. POKROVSKY: What disciplinary measures were there in Rakovo Camp and for what reasons were the prisoners punished? Do you know?
KIVELISHA: Yes. I know that there was, in the camp grounds, a cell for prisoners condemned to solitary confinement. Prisoners of war guilty of attempting to escape from the terrible conditions created for them in captivity, or with offenses such as stealing food products in the kitchen, were locked up in this cell.
It was in the cellar; it had a cement floor and windows with iron bars instead of panes. The prisoner was stripped to the skin, deprived of food and water, and locked up in solitary confinement for 14 days. I do not know of a single case where a prisoner survived this confinement; all of them died in that particular cell.
COL. POKROVSKY: Evidently the conditions which you have described to the Tribunal increased the number of persons suffering from exhaustion.
KIVELISHA: Yes.
COL. POKROVSKY: Did this condition result in a decreased number of prisoners capable of working? Did their number decrease; what was done to those prisoners who could not work?
KIVELISHA: An immense number of prisoners were kept, in Rakovo Camp, in stables which were quite unfit for human beings to live in during the winter period. At first everybody was made to work. I can safely say that most of this work was entirely aimless, since it consisted in pulling down houses and then paving the camp grounds with bricks from the demolished buildings. After some time, when severe gastric troubles had set in, troubles which I have already mentioned, fewer and fewer prisoners came out to work.
Many of them, who had lost all control of their movements, never even left the stables for the appointed meal times, and if a great many people were discovered to have lost their strength, a so-called quarantine was established. In such a stable all the exits and entries would be blocked and the patients would be completely isolated from the outer world. Having kept them locked up for 4 or 5 days on end, the stable would be opened and the dead brought out by the hundreds.
COL. POKROVSKY: Can you tell us, Witness, on what medical or sanitary work you and the other doctors were employed in the camp by the Germans?