HALINA MASIAK

On 19 Febraury 1946 in Warsaw, Court Assessor Antoni Krzętowski, delegated to the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, interviewed the person specified below as an unsworn witness. The witness was advised of the obligation to speak the truth and the criminal liability for making false declarations. The witness testified as follows:


Name and surname Halina Masiak
Names of parents Antoni Drużyński and Sabina née Garwolińska
Date of birth 19 December 1914
Place of residence Warsaw, Lipska Street 28, flat 5
Occupation beautician and masseuse
Education secondary school and cosmetic school
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Criminal record none

During the Warsaw Uprising, I lived at Działdowska Street 16. My brother-in-law, Leon Nałęcz (husband of my sister Sabina), together with my father, Antoni Drużyński, who both fell victim to German thugs, lived at that time at Grójecka Street 24, flat 11, as it seems. Apart from my father and brother-in-law, my mother and the eleven-month-old child of my sister Sabina were in that flat.

On 5 August 1944, German soldiers (reportedly Gestapo men) and “Ukrainians” burst into that house and ordered the women and children to leave the house, and they led everyone out into the yard of a building opposite, but they gathered men in the yard and told them to go into the basement one by one with their hands up, and after entering, they were murdered with a shot in the back of the head.

I know these details from a certain Cugowski, who miraculously survived that execution. I don’t know Cugowski’s current address, but I have some hopes of obtaining it, and then I shall to send it by post to the citizen judge.

Cugowski told me that all together there were 37 men gathered in the yard and assigned to be executed. He himself avoided death - as he told me - perhaps because the moment before the shot was fired, he spoke to his tormentor with the words: Das ist deutsche Kultur, which caused - as he thinks - a twitch of the hand of the German or the “Ukrainian”, who then missed.

In February 1945, I went to the area of the house, where the execution had taken place. The bodies of the victims, only partly burned, were located in two basements located opposite. In one of them, located on the right, I found the corpses of my father and brother-in-law.

As regards my father, I recognized his corpse on the basis of his clothes, well known to me, and a lighter found on him, which my husband had given to him as a gift before, but father’s facial features were still quite distinct. I recognized my brother-in-law on the basis of a registration found on him for obtaining a food card for his little daughter, placed in the pocket of clothes familiar to me.

In searching for the corpses of my father and brother-in-law in the basement on the right side, I turned over more or less 18 bodies. There were so many of them in the basement.

I don’t know how many corpses there were in the basement on the left.

My mother and the daughter of my sister were transported to Pruszków, where they were set free.

Read out.

I am adding that Cugowski is a railway technician, he works somewhere at the railway in Warsaw, he lives on Bema Street.