Warsaw, 25 June 1946. Judge Halina Wereńko, delegated to the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, has interviewed the person named below as a witness. Having advised the witness of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the significance of the oath, the judge took the oath on the basis of art. 109 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The witness testified as follows:
| Name | Józef Osiński |
| Names of parents | Unknown and Józefa Osińska |
| Date of birth | 13 March 1898 |
| Occupation | driver |
| Education | seven grades of elementary school and craft school |
| Place of residence | […] |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
At the moment of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, I was in my flat at Wolska Street 115.
In the early days of the Uprising a unit of the Wehrmacht was stationed in the vicinity of our house. They withdrew on 5 August, at 9 a.m.
At this time I was staying in a flat on the first floor of the annexe. From the window, I saw a unit of the SS, gendarmerie and Vlasovtsy entering the Gerlach factory on Grabowskiego Street.
I recognized the formation because I had served as a warrant officer [chorąży] during the world war and am familiar with the types of troops.
I saw the Vlasovtsy drinking vodka in the courtyard. Shortly afterwards, a troop of Vlasovtsy, among whom I also saw gendarmes and SS-men, rushed into our house. They ordered the residents to leave the house (raus). The soldiers dragged people brutally from their homes, not allowing them to take any belongings; residents were ordered to keep their hands up.
The group of residents from our house who went out onto Wolska Street numbered up to 700 people. The German soldiers set fire to the house in front of our eyes. Our group was directed to the lot in front of the forge at Wolska Street 124. In the lot I saw a crowd of people lying down.
They were residents of houses on Wolska Street, numbers 115, 117, 119, 123, 124 and 126. I remember the following names of residents of Wolska Street 115, lying down at the forge: a woman named Socha (with her daughters Maria and Władysława), Dominiak, Duda and Halina Grabowska, who was the landlady. I also recognized some people from number 117 – the owner of the house Tadeusz Gardocki with his father, Jan and Zofia Rogowski from number 123, with their daughter-in-law and two children, and many people from houses number 119, 124 and 126, whom I only knew by sight, without knowing their names.
Right after our group was led into the lot, we were told to fall to the ground. I fell a few meters from the one-storey house in the backyard of house number 124. My wife Aleksandra née Guzen and my daughters, Stanisława (born in 1923) and Helena (born in 1929) fell right behind me. Right after, the German soldiers (I also saw Vlasovtsy and SS-men in this group) opened fire at the people lying down on the ground from their machine guns, set up on the property at Wolska Street 123, as well as handguns and rifles. They also threw grenades.
During the execution, I could heard deafening shots from a cannon somewhere nearby. The gunshots silenced the screams and groans of the wounded and dying.
Seeing people massacred around me, I rushed on all fours to the door of the nearest house. My daughters and wife followed me. None of us were wounded. We found ourselves in a staircase, all the doors were locked. I forced open the door to the basement. The German soldiers must have realized that someone had escaped; they shot at the door of the house, bringing down part of the outer wall.
It was dangerous in the basement, shots were densely pouring in through the windows. So I broke down the door to the attic and took my family there. I hid the women under the roof, covering them with papers, and as for myself, I sat crouching behind the chimney.
From below came sounds of volleys, grenades, screams and groans. I suppose that new groups of people were being brought in constantly.
Peering through holes in the roof, I saw two groups, of about 500 men and 300 women, being led along Wolska Street from the city. The mass executions in the lot in front of the forge ended in the afternoon, at approximately 6 p.m., judging by the sun. The surrounding houses were burning, the fire spread to corpses lying nearby. A group of about 20 men was brought in (a number of them wearing white bands on their sleeves). The men picked up the corpses and stacked them into piles. At about 8 p.m., the group was shot.
At some point, as I sat behind the chimney (I cannot specify the exact time), I heard footsteps on the stairs and a gendarme with a hand-held machine gun in his hand came into the attic. I killed him by surprise, he did not even manage to make a sound. I hid the corpse and the gun under the roof. I did the same thing twice more, when two gendarmes came into the attic, one after the other. Finally, I heard footsteps on the stairs for the fourth time and someone shouted in Polish: “Hello, anyone who is alive, come down, we are blowing up the house.” Despite the despair of my wife and daughters I did not let them go down.
After some time, we felt acrid smoke; it became clear that the house in whose attic we were hiding, was burning. We then went into the basement. I closed the doors to the attic and basement carefully so that the draft would not fuel the fire. At about 8 p.m. the fire had become so intense that it was necessary for us to leave. We went through the flames into Elekcyjna Street. My older daughter, Helena, got injured in that march, so later she spent four weeks in a hospital in Błonie near Warsaw, where her scorched legs were treated. As for my younger daughter and my wife, I carried them through in my arms. We hid in Müller’s house on Elekcyjna Street (I do not remember the number).
Elekcyjna Street – from the house we were in all the way to the corner of Wolska Street – was densely strewn with the corpses of civilians: men, women, and children. In front of the magistrate’s house, on the corner of Wolska and Elekcyjna streets, corpses lay in layers, on top of one another. The magistrate’s house was on fire, I saw a man who jumped from one of the floors of the burning house shot in the air by the gendarmes standing or loitering on Elekcyjna Street.
At first, my family and I hid under the corpses. Then my wife and daughters hid in the toilet next to Müller’s house, while I crawled down Elekcyjna Street, trying to figure out how we could get away. There were too many gendarmes, however; escape was impossible. I returned to the courtyard of Müller’s house and we all hid in rabbit cages.
On 6 August at 2 p.m., as a group of gendarmes approached from the direction of Wolska Street, my family and I ran to the Sowiński Park and there, avoiding German soldiers, we crawled into the Orthodox cemetery, whence we went into the fields, heading towards the nearby villages of Babice and Błonie.
At that the report was concluded and read out.