ATTENTION! Unknown deputy captain Pilecki (English version)

„Podkarpacka Historia” was sent by Janusz G, and prepared by an editor for naszepismo.pl 

  Witold Pilecki and Stanislaw Baranski. The brothers Emil and Stanisław Barański were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in the first transport in June 1940.Behind the barbed wire of the camp, they saved not only themselves, but also other prisoners, they were active in the camp underground, and Stanisław – according to hardly available sources, was even one of the deputies of the head of the underground organization, Captain Witold Pilecki.This unknown fragment of our history is only described in the 2016 „Podkarpacka Historia”.

We know very little about the pre-war fate of the brothers. Only their low-quality photos from high school days have survived, and they look younger than they really are. They both came from the small town of Dynów in the Rzeszów poviat. Emil (sometimes we meet the name Emilian) Marian Barański was born on July 23, 1919. In 1938 he passed his secondary school-leaving examination in the famous 1st Junior High School in Rzeszów. His brother Stanisław Florian was less than two years younger. He was born on May 4, 1921. The war interrupted his education in the third year of the same school that Emil attended.

First transport to Auschwitz! Most likely, both of them were associated with the fledgling conspiracy. On May 1, 1940, as a result of a raid on young people from Rzeszów, suspected of participating in an illegal organization, the Gestapo arrested 40 young people. Among them Barański. First, they were sent to a prison in Tarnów, from where on June 14, 1940, in a group of over seven hundred companions in captivity, they found themselves in the newly created Auschwitz camp. They had to change their names to numbers. Staszek was assigned the number 132, Emil 377.

„There is a large inscription on the railway station building – the name of the village AUSCHWITZ. Someone explains that it is Oświęcim. Some little hole. (…) We are probably entering some side line, as we are making a great arc until the wheels of the train grind mercilessly. We mustn’t even move now. You can’t even look at the windows. We sit still. (…) From behind the window you can hear wild German screams, bustling and patter. Suddenly the door of our car opens with force. Someone from outside is screaming – Alle raus!… Loos, verfluchte Banditen! (…) They hit us on the back with rifle butts until we rumble. We all push ourselves to the only exit at once. One by one, we jump from the high wagon, straight onto the SS men forming a lane stretching towards a high fence surrounding a large building (…)

The brothers, like over 700 hundreds of other prisoners, had to listen to a speech by an exceptional sadist Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, who announced that leaving the camp was only possible through the chimney. The period of almost five years of hard labor began for the Barański brothers.

At the side of Captain Pilecki! The fate of Emil and Stanisław in the camp is fragmentarily known, as are their biographies. Like the others from the first transport, they had to learn to live in abnormal conditions. Those who survived the first period, with time, advanced to the rank of a kind of camp elders, „old numbers” enjoying the reputation of not only other prisoners, but also overseers. In September 1940, Captain Witold Pilecki was sent to Auschwitz along with the Warsaw transport. Using false documents in the name of Tomasz Serafiński, he allowed himself to be caught in a street round-up to see with his own eyes what was happening in the camp. On his initiative, a secret Military Organization Union was established in Oświęcim, whose purpose was – as he reported after the war, before his arrest by the Security Service and murder, Pilecki himself „to keep his colleagues in spirits by providing and disseminating information from the outside, and organizing food and distribution of clothes as much as possible. among the organized and as the crowning achievement of everything, the preparation of own troops to take control of the camp when the order of the moment comes”.

From the very beginning, the Barański brothers became involved with Pilecki. Stanisław was especially involved in the conspiracy, who – as some materials show – was even supposed to be the „second deputy” of the captain. One of the people who owed their lives to Barański was Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, a talented boxer of the Warsaw Legia and a pupil of the famous coach Feliks Stamm. Like his brothers, Pietrzykowski ended up in Auschwitz with the first transport. In the camp he had to box – to the delight of the SS men -. In the spring of 1941, Pietrzykowski became involved in the underground. This is how he later recalled his contact with Pilecki: “I no longer remember the name of the prisoner who contacted him. Anyway, after making the acquaintance, we started talking. It turned out that we had mutual friends in the circle of cavalrymen. Later, he asked me to sort things out several times. He did it through Staszek Barański, because he did not want to expose himself to denunciations from the camp Gestapo’s spy ”.

The Baranski brothers with Pilecki saved Pietrzykowski’s life when he was taken to the camp hospital after one of the fights. Under the pretext of injecting vitamins, he was infected with typhus, he was to be a guinea pig in pseudo-medical experiments. He was losing consciousness, weakened, feverish. As his biographer Marta Bogacka writes, on the day of the selection in the hospital planned by the SS, which would probably end with his death, Pilecki-Serafiński appeared: “Two prisoners Stanisław and Emil Barański arrived with Tomasz Serafiński. They helped him up and led him to the block where he slept before being placed in the hospital. In this way, they probably saved him from death. Then they helped him get an assignment to a new job in SS-Revier, a hospital for SS men. Initially, he worked as a cleaner, with time he learned more and became an independent paramedic. Besides, he still had to fight”.

Pietrzykowski later described Stanisław, whom he considered his best friend, in one of his letters: “Young man – 1921. A scout, high school graduate, extremely talented and noble, rendered invaluable services in the camp conspiracy (…). In such a commando, with such colleagues, a person began to feel calm and believed more in his star. To these colleagues and the like, many people in the camp owe help and rescue, in many simply hopeless situations ”.

The Barański brothers stayed in Auschwitz until June 14, 1943, when they were sent to the camp in Neuengamme. The same transport was also used by Pietrzykowski, but later sent to Bergen-Belsen, where on April 15, 1945, he lived to see the liberation. He survived largely due to his boxing prowess, his fights being a distraction for the guards.

The tragedy in the Bay of Lübeck! The Barański brothers stayed in Neuengamme until the end of the camp’s existence. Together with thousands of other prisoners, they marched towards the Bay of Lübeck, where they were loaded onto ships. On May 3, 1945, after the fall of Berlin, Emil and Stanisław found themselves on the Cap Arcona ship. They could not have known that the Allies were watching the transport, believing that the notable Nazis wanted to escape it. They were more expecting death from SS men who wanted to get rid of witnesses of their crimes.

We will probably never know the exact details of the deaths of both brothers. To imagine the hell they find themselves in, we can only rely on the accounts of the survivors of the raid and the subsequent slaughter prepared for the prisoners by the SS and German civilians. Zbigniew Fołtyński, ps. The seal, who was sent to the Neuengamme camp from the Warsaw Uprising, recalled: “Suddenly we heard shots, explosions, smoke and stench. It turned out that the English did not know who was inside and began to bombard the ship. They threw explosive and incendiary bombs. In any case, the ship started to burn. Here I experienced a great tragedy. I was three stories below the deck. The mountain began to burn. Somehow, while fighting, I managed to get on board when the fire began to spread over the entire ship. There was no way out. You had to jump into the water and the water was only 10 degrees warm, but you had to risk it”.

On the other hand, Marian Socha, another survivor of Cap Arcona, reported: “The great ship did not even budge as several deadly bombs got bogged down in its body. He stood as before. The hum of the planes slowly faded away and finally died away. There were, however, volleys from submachine guns. Single at first, then denser. It was the SS men, already wearing lifejackets, who fired left and right in crowds crowding the upper decks of the ship The fight was for the right to the lifeboats. Narrow, steep stairs favored the terrified SS men. Heaps of corpses collapsed the exits…”

The story of the brothers Emil and Stanisław Barański is still waiting to be worked out. Their boss from the camp organization – Captain Witold Pilecki – was recognized after years of oblivion. The silhouettes of young boys from Dynów are now only reminiscent of plaques with names and surnames placed in Rzeszów next to the „Passage” monument by another Auschwitz prisoner, the outstanding artist Józef Szajna.

A monument in the shape of a man, whose silhouette is standing next to it, as if it came from inside …

„Podkarpacka Historia” was sent by Janusz G, and prepared by an editor for naszepismo.pl

^^^

^Attention ! We pay attention to the similarity of the names of boxers; Pietrzykowski -Tadeusz with Zbigniew, Olympian and multiple Polish and European champion.

^^RAF Pilot Allan Wyse of No. 193 Squadron recalled, „We used our cannon fire at the chaps in the water… we shot them up with 20 mm cannons in the water. Horrible thing, but we were told to do it and we did it. That’s war.

^^^None of the prison flotilla were Red Cross marked! Parts of skeletons washed ashore over the next 30 years, with the last find in 1971.

^^^^At that time, the victims did not call the murderers „Nazis”, but truthfully Germans. Officially the „Nazis” came out at the time of Political Correctness!

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