JÓZEFA ŚLIWONIK

On 2 March 1976 in Warsaw S. Banasiński, voivodeship deputy prosecutor delegated to the District Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Warsaw, proceeding in accordance with the provisions of Article 4 of the decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws No. 51, Item 293) and Article 129 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, personally interviewed the below-mentioned as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false statements, the witness confirmed with her own signature that she had been informed of this liability (Article 172 of the Code of Criminal Procedure). The witness then testified as follows:


Name and surname Józefa Śliwonik
Parents’ names Antoni and Jadwiga
Date and place of birth 10 February 1900 in Chomice
Place of residence Olsztyn, Chopina Street 4, apt. 6
Occupation unemployed
Education none
Criminal record for perjury none
Relationship to the parties none

During the occupation I was living in the Waniewo settlement, then Wysokie Mazowieckie district. In that same settlement there lived my distant relative, Władysława Krysiewicz. Her husband was Stanisław Krysiewicz. Allegedly, during the occupation Krysiewicz sheltered Jews on his homestead.

In 1943, on the night of 8/9 September, my son awoke at home and told me he that could hear shots being fired in the village. I approached the window and saw Władysława and Stanisław Krysiewicz’s buildings ablaze. I also heard multiple shots and cries.

The next morning I went to the Krysiewicz homestead together with Jan Janucik, a resident of the village of Pszczółczyn. There I saw that the barn and pigpen had been burned, only the house survived. In the farmyard, close to where the barn used to stand, there lay the body of Stanisław Krysiewicz. A dozen or so meters further there lay the body of some man. Janucik told me that this is the body of a Jew. Some 20 paces on I saw the bodies of several people, but I don’t know how many, I never came close. I don’t even know if they were bodies of men or women.

I can’t say in what circumstances Stanisław Krysiewicz and those other people perished. Local residents would say that Krysiewicz and the others were shot by the gendarmes from the gendarmerie station in Tykocin.

The Krysiewiczs had five minor children. That day when I saw the bodies of Krysiewicz and the other people neither his wife nor children were home, so I went over to the neighbors of the Krysiewiczs, Wacław Wołosik and his wife Marianna. At the Wołosiks’ I found the Krysiewicz children. Mrs. Wołosik told me that the Germans had brought the children at night and made them take care of those kids. The Wołosiks said that [the Germans] took Krysiewicz’s wife to Tykocin. She spent about a week in jail at the gendarmerie station in Tykocin. Then she was shot at the Jewish cemetery in Tykocin.

Mrs. Krysiewicz’s sister, I don’t recall her last name (she now lives in Łapy), told me that the body of Władysława Krysiewicz was lying in a Jewish cemetery, next to the body of a Jewish woman. Krysiewicz’s body was buried at the cemetery in Waniewo and that of his wife at the cemetery in Kobylin. I did not participate in either of the burials.

At this the report was concluded, read out and signed.