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Stanisław Frączysty, Tatra mountain courier during the Second World War turns 90
Stanisław Frączysty of Chochołów, recipient of the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari Order, marked his 90th birthday on February 5. He was a Union of Armed Struggle-Home Army (ZWZ-AK) soldier and Tatra mountain courier during the Second World War. In an operation carried off with great bravado in October 1941, he led Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz across the border.
The Germans arrested Frączysty on February 22, 1942. After undergoing a grueling interrogation in “the Palace,” Zakopane Gestapo headquarters, he was transferred to prison in Cracow and then, on March 26, to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
He performed slave labor on the construction of the Buna-Werke plants, the train line in the vicinity of Auschwitz, and several other labor details. Near the end of November 1944, he was one of several hundred prisoners transferred to Buchenwald Concentration camp in the depths of Germany.
After being liberated in April 1945 and spending several months in the American occupation zone, Frączysty returned to Poland. The Security Bureau (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, the secret police), arrested him in 1949 for allegedly cooperating with foreign intelligence agencies.
Andrzej Przewoźnik, general secretary of the Council for the Commemoration of the Struggle and Martyrdom of the Polish People, called on Frączysty on his birthday, as did delegations from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Polish Army.
It is worth recalling that the entire Frączysty family was involved to a remarkable degree in clandestine resistance activity. His elder brother Franciszek, a member of a so-called non-front-line diversionary group, was arrested in November 1941 and died in Auschwitz in June 1942. Gustaw Frączysty, who was also a Tatra mountain courier, reached Hungary and then made his way through Yugoslavia to Africa, where he enlisted in a Polish military unit. He was killed in action near Bologna in 1945, with the Polish II Corps. Stanisław Frączysty’s three sisters, Rozalia, Zofia, and Władysława, were subjected to repression for their own resistance activity or that of their husbands.
