On 8 January 1946 in Radom, Investigating Judge Kazimierz Borys of the II District of the Regional Court in Radom with its seat in Radom interviewed the person mentioned hereunder as a witness, without taking an oath. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Antoni Czarnecki |
| Age | 45 years old |
| Parents’ names | Franciszek and Marianna |
| Place of residence | Firlej, commune of Wielogóra |
| Occupation | laborer |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
I lived in Firlej throughout the German occupation, and was therefore able to observe a lot of what went on in the sands. Sometimes I looked through my window, and sometimes through a hole in the roof. I first noticed that the Germans were executing people in the sands after few small boys told me that a student had been shot there the previous day. I went to the spot where he was buried and noticed traces of blood on the heaped earth. I started digging, however I soon stopped in light of the risks that this entailed. Two or so weeks later – this was in the spring of 1940, although I cannot provide an exact date – I counted 29 trucks driving from Radom in the direction of Firlej. The vehicles turned towards the sands. Observing from afar (the German guard posts would not let me get closer), I saw how the Nazis unloaded around 16 people from one of the trucks and led them to freshly-dug pits, where these prisoners were then shot. A whole German detachment took part in the execution. The victims were fired at from behind. When they fell, they were finished off with revolvers. Finally, just to make sure, the Germans would fire a machine gun burst. After the first group of people had been murdered, the second was led out and dispatched in the same way. This was repeated until all the trucks had been emptied. Having completed the killing, the Germans buried the bodies and left in the direction of Radom. My children and neighbors, who had been to the execution site, told me that there were skull fragments, teeth and other body fragments strewn over the freshly dug earth.
This large group of victims, numbering a few hundred people, had come from the commune of Chlewiska, where Polish partisans had clashed with the Germans. The dead included men, women, and children.
From that time on, executions were carried out regularly. Trucks plied the road between Radom and Firlej nearly every day, and sometimes even a few times a day or at night.
The graves that appeared in the wake of these executions were more than six meters long and some two meters wide.
In the winter, when the snowbanks made it impossible for the trucks to drive deeper into the sands, [the Germans] would stop on the road leading towards the sands and execute the people led out of the trucks with revolvers. After the final shot had been fired, a Gestapo man would spray the bodies with a machine gun. The murdered victims would then be covered with a thin layer of sand mixed with snow. The day after such an execution the bodies would be so visible that the police were forced to ensure their burial.
Once I saw how two Gestapo men brought a 14-year-old boy to the sands of Firlej. When the boy tried to pick an acacia flower – instructed to do so by one of the men – they shot him. Individual executions of this type were quite common.
In October 1943, the Germans evicted all those residents of Firlej and Wincentów who lived near the sands where the executions took place, and started burning the bodies. They screened the location with mats. I don’t know whether they erected a crematorium, or if the bodies were burned on a pyre. Whatever the case may have been, we saw a column of fire and smoke and smelled the stench of rotting human flesh. These incinerations continued until April 1944. During this period they also brought in bodies from other townships; these were delivered in covered trucks with special box-like structures.
I don’t know whether the executions were continued at the time. Afterwards, however, they were definitely resumed. They were most intense in the summer of 1944, when the German eastern front collapsed.
The last execution took place just before the arrival of the Red Army.
The report was read out.