Bruniany Wawrzyniec

Bruniany, Wawrzyniec During the war, Wawrzyniec Bruniany, his wife and two children lived in the town of Nadworna, Stanislawow district, in Eastern Galicia. When the Red Army invaded in September 1939, Bruniany was working in his father’s brick-works, which was seized by the Soviet authorities. It was here that he met Josef Kleinman. When both Josef and Wawrzyniec’s families were threatened with deportation to Siberia, Josef bribed a NKVD man and saved both families. This is how their friendship began. When the Nazis occupied Nadworna, Josef and his family were moved into the ghetto, and Wawrzyniec helped them by smuggling in food. He also tried to talk Josef into fleeing, and they agreed that Josef would escape on the day of the liquidation of the ghetto. The last Aktion took place in October 1942. Josef’s father had already been deported and Josef, who was sick with typhus, escaped to Wawrzyniec’s house in the area of the brick-works, which were no longer in operation. The next day, Josef’s cousin, who was also sick, arrived at the brick-works. Bruniany hid them in one of the boxes at the brick-works, bricking up the entrance to the box but leaving an aperture through which he passed them food and sometimes newspapers to read by the dim light of a lantern. “We entered the box on October 29 and I left it…. when the Russians came,” Josef wrote in his testimony to Yad Vashem. “My cousin did not survive, she died two months before the liberation. I covered her body with the stones in the box and thanks to the ventilation, the smell did not waft outside.” Josef only told Wawrzyniec about his cousin’s death after he had left the box, and Wawrzyniec burst into tears. “When I came to him, I brought everything I had with me, including clothes, for him to hide,” Josef wrote. “He didn’t take anything. Once, at Christmas, he asked me to lend him my coat for Mass. I told him to take it as a present, but he refused.” In 1950, Josef immigrated to Israel, and in1962, he invited Wawrzyniec, who was then living in Dolny Slask, to visit him. On February 19, 1976, Yad Vashem recognized Wawrzyniec Bruniany as Righteous Among the Nations.