WŁADYSŁAW DRYJA

On 15 January 1946 in Radom, 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 Władysław Dryja
Age 49 years old
Parents’ names Józef and Zofia
Place of residence Wólka Klwatecka, commune of Wielogóra
Occupation shoemaker
Religion Roman Catholic
Criminal record none
Relationship to the parties none

I was a witness to an execution that was held in Firlej in the summer of 1944. On the day in question, a truck drove up the sands with five persons – two women and three men. The victims were unloaded from the vehicle and led up to a freshly dug pit, thrown into it, and thereafter shot dead with revolvers. I saw the Germans removing the weapons from their holsters. The last of the victims was probably unable to walk, for the Germans led him along by his arms, while he looked as if he would collapse at any moment. Having brought him to the hollow, they threw him in and killed him.

I didn’t see any other executions. But I did witness trucks driving regularly between Radom and Firlej, sometimes even a few times a day. Soon after the vehicles reached the sands, I heard gunshots. In the main, these were bursts of machine gun fire, followed by single shots. I went to the sands between executions and on occasion found bodies barely hidden beneath the earth. You could also stumble upon shreds of clothing, pieces of skin, fragments of skull bones with hair, etc.

The executions were continued until January 1945, right until the entry of the Red Army.

In the autumn of 1943 the Germans evicted the local residents and, having first screened the area with mats, started burning the bodies of the murdered victims. You could see smoke. I didn’t see any flames. You could smell the stench of decaying human bodies from the direction of the sands. These incinerations continued until the spring of 1944. During this time I would also hear gunshots from the same direction.

The report was read out.