Henryk Troszczynski

KATYN and Home Army (AK)

The last witness of the Katyn forest death pits. He saw the mass graves of the Katyn Massacre as early as 1942.

Henryk Troszczynski was born to Jozef Troszczyński and Berta (nee Ekiert) on 28 July 1923 in Warsaw, Poland. He was only sixteen when the war broke out. He attended a professional electrician’s school (1939) and worked in the Philips Plant during the war.

In the winter of 1942, he became a Home Army (AK) soldier and worked at the Okecie airport in occupied Warsaw, hired by the German Bauleitung company.

In the fall of 1942, the company was ordered to undertake construction behind the German lines on the Eastern Front - in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union near Smolensk. For the Poles employed there, this meant forced labour. A refusal could have tragic consequences: Auschwitz or repressions against families.

As a forced labourer of the German Todt organisation, he worked in Smolensk, where he heard rumours about the Soviet killings of Polish POWs. After the work in Smolensk was completed, Henryk and the other 35 Polish labourers were sent to the village of Kozie Gorki near Katyn. There, they began building barracks for Wehrmacht soldiers near an abandoned holiday resort for NKVD officers.

He established acquaintances with the local people which revealed terrible facts. In the spring of 1940, railway transports of Polish officers arrived at the Gniazdowo station. From there, they were transported by car to Katyn. According to local residents, screams and shots were heard in the forest, although according to later findings, most of the victims were murdered in the NKVD building. The corpses were buried on the spot in great pits dug by bulldozers. The residents indicated their location to Henryk.

Troszczynski and other Polish workers took shovels with them and went to the place indicated by the Russians. He emphasized that they were not the first there, because they came across two previously set wooden crosses. This coincides with the knowledge that in October 1941 mass graves were discovered by Polish forced laborers employed by the Todt organization on the railway works of the time. After them, other Polish workers also made their discoveries in March 1942. They came from the vicinity of Poznań, and were employed by the same German organization.

Although they were not the first, as it turned out, it was probably only their discovery that initiated a chain of events that became significant for the revelation of the crimes and that influenced international politics during and after the war.

As Henryk reported, after arriving at the site, they quickly dug up bodies and saw Polish uniforms and insignia. Among the disturbing images, Henryk especially remembered the remains of a woman - as it turned out later, 2nd Lt. Janina Lewandowska, daughter of General Jozef Dowbor-Musnicki (the only Polish female soldier murdered in Katyn) and the body of a little boy - probably an accidental witness to the crime caught by the Soviet murderers.

Henryk worked building barracks in Kozie Gorki with a young German soldier. Despite the communication difficulties, after some time he managed to tell him what he and his colleagues had discovered in the Katyn forest. The soldier contacted his commander, who appreciated the importance of the information and immediately notified Berlin.

In February 1943, the Germans began exhumation work, and on 11 April 1943, the message about the Soviet crime was announced by the Transocean agency, and two days later broadcast from Berlin.

In the spring of 1940, the Russian NKVD had murdered about 22,000 Polish citizens with a shot to the back of the head. The Soviets killed over 14,5000 officers of the Polish Army and Polish police officials, as well as government officials, professors, etc.

The Red Army occupied the area on 28 September 1943. Before this happened, Henryk’s father bribed a German from the Schaffhausen company who brought paychecks and letters from the Warsaw headquarters of the company. Under the pretext of the funeral of his allegedly deceased mother, Henryk left Katyn. He was convinced that his colleagues never returned from Katyn. Perhaps as witnesses to the crime, they were murdered by the Soviets.

Henryk later participated in the Warsaw Uprising. During the slaughter of Wola he was captured by the Germans and set to be shot on the street. He was not hit and survived. He was then sent as a a forced labourer, taken to the Pruszków transit camp (Dulag 121), and then he was sent to the Namslau camp.

After the war, he was incorporated into the so-called Polish People's Army, where he served as a radio telegrapher. After his dismissal from the army, he became an electroacoustic specialist and worked for Polish theatres and leading theatres of several other countries of the socialist bloc. When the “Polish-German Reconciliation” Foundation was established in 1991, he applied to it for financial redress, and on the form, he entered the word “Katyn” – a word that was banned for 45 years. He was immediately asked for a detailed description.

He finally gave his testimony in 1991. Since then, he has given several interviews, recounting what he saw. His story became the book “The Boy from Katyn” published in 2018.

He was a member of the Warsaw Insurgents Union and lived in the Kombatant Social Welfare Home in Warsaw. Henryk Troszczynski, the Home Army soldier and Warsaw Uprising veteran, passed away on 8 December 2019 at the age of 96 years.