Testimony given by citizen Leon Osiecki, born on 18 June 1892, resident in Zielonka near Warsaw at Poniatowskiego Street 10.
Concerns: the murder by a Nazi gendarme of my son, Janusz Osiecki, born on 15 July 1927.
On 2 December 1943 at around 10.00 a.m., my son arrived in Zielonka from Warsaw. At this time, a group of Nazi gendarmes left Rembertów in the direction of Zielonka to conduct a sweep operation in the vicinity of Marki. My son was near the Zielonka train stop when the horde of gendarmes approached; true to their custom, they started beating passers-by and firing blindly. People were trying to escape and hide. My son did not manage to conceal himself, and was stopped by one of the Nazi thugs and hit across the face with a revolver butt. When he clasped his face, bleeding, the German beast – the gendarme – shot at him, puncturing both the boy’s lungs and killing him on the spot. Having committed the murder, the gendarmes searched through his pockets and took everything that he had on his person, namely the following items:
| 1) | an identity card |
| 2) | a railway identity card (my son worked on the railway) |
| 3) | a school identity card (he was a student at a technical school) |
| 4) | a monthly railway ticket |
| 5) | a notebook |
| 6) | an electric torch |
| 7) | a penknife |
| 8) | a few zlotys |
| 9) | a wallet |
and other small items that he had with him. I did not regain any of these articles.
The German beasts immediately ordered that he be buried in the street, but the commandant of the Polish police, one Zagrajek, who had walked up to the scene of the crime, asked them to allow the boy’s body to be taken to his parents’ house, explaining to the beasts that he knew the dead boy’s parents and that both they and their children were very respectable people. The Germans then gave permission for my son’s body to be taken, but instructed that he be buried as quickly as possible, without organizing a funeral, at the latest the next day – and quietly. The time was 12.00 p.m.
The commandant of the Polish police, Zagrajek, said that the gendarmes had allowed me to take my son’s body because Zagrajek knew one of them personally – he was once a commandant of the Polish police, but later registered as a Volksdeutscher.
A moment before the murder, when my son was trying to walk away in the direction of home, a man was walking in front of him – one Guberski, now deceased. A few months after the incident he was deported to Germany, where he died. The gendarmes stopped him and started tormenting him in a bestial manner, punching and kicking him; indeed, they would have killed him if not for his child, a daughter aged 8 or 9, who had been walking towards the stop to meet him. Upon seeing him lying on the ground, all bloodied, she threw herself onto him, crying, which may have softened the hearts of the German beasts. The gendarme who was tormenting him the most gave him one more kick, holstered his revolver and walked away, leaving the beaten man with his daughter.
Soon after the horde of barbaric gendarmes left Zielonka, taking the road for Marki, they killed some other boy (18 years old) near the road in the village of Siwki; he is buried next to my son.