Mariusz Zaruski was born on 31.01.1867 in Dumanovo in Podolia. He was a Polish general, sailor and mountaineer. During World War I, he fought in the Legions under the command of Józef Piłsudski - he joined the 1st Uhlan Regiment of the Polish Legions, binding himself to the cavalry for the entire war. In 1920, he took part in the battles for Vilnius, for which he was awarded the Order of Virtuti Militari, and received a platinum ring from the grateful people of the city. In 1923, he was appointed General Adjutant to the President of the Republic of Poland, and in 1924 was promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General. In 1925, he went into reserve. He was the initiator of the foundation of the Tatra Mountains Volunteer Rescue Service and its first president; moreover, he made great contributions to the development of Polish mountaineering, skiing and sailing. After the outbreak of World War II, General Zaruski volunteered for the army, but his entry was not accepted. As a result, he evacuated together with the civilian population of Warsaw and ended up in Lviv, where he and his wife stayed for some time under a changed name (they used the surname Sidorowicz). However, they were denounced by someone and arrested by the NKVD. The general was 72 years old at the time, but the NKVD considered him very dangerous and arrested him. He went through several prisons and was eventually imprisoned in Kherson. The general was in poor health. At the beginning of March 1941, he was taken unconscious to the prison hospital, where he died on 8.04.1941. He was buried in the local cemetery in an unnamed grave in the quarter reserved for the burial of dead prisoners.

For many years, circles in Poland associated with Mariusz Zaruski made efforts to exhume the general's ashes. Unfortunately, it was not possible to identify his body, so in 1997 soil from the Kherson cemetery was taken for an urn and buried with great honours in the Pęksowy Brzysku cemetery in Zakopane.

In 2011, thanks to financial support from the Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom, scouts from the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association (ZHP) in the Kherson cemetery cleaned up the cemetery section where the victims of the NKVD were buried. A symbolic grave of General Zaruski was set up in the quaternion. This grave was vandalised by unknown perpetrators in 2014, but members of the Kherson Regional Polish Society "Polonia" led to the quick repair of the object.