Polish inmate boxer remembered

camp.
The story of fellow inmate and boxer Tadeusz Pietrzykowski has been all but forgotten nearly seven decades after the end of World War II. The very idea of sport at Auschwitz seems preposterous.

The camp was set up by the Nazis in southern Poland after their 1939 invasion to hold and kill Polish political prisoners, and was to become a hub of the Holocaust, during which the Nazis murdered six million Jews.

Polish author Marta Bogacka, in a new book “The Auschwitz Boxer”, has brought the story of Pietrzykowski, little known outside Poland, back into the spotlight. To Sobolewicz (89) it still seems like yesterday.

“The first bout took place on a Sunday in March 1941 next to the Auschwitz kitchens between Tadeusz Pietrzykowski and the German ‘kapo’ Walter Dunning,” he said.

A rumour went around that Dunning, a former middleweight professional who had fallen foul of the law, was looking for an opponent in exchange for a loaf of bread and some margarine.

Pietrzykowski, a pre-war bantamweight at the boxing club Legia Warsaw, rose to the challenge. “Teddy, as the Polish media nicknamed him before the war, must have weighed about 45 kilos, and Walter around 70,” Sobolewicz said.

In peacetime, the maximum fighting weight in Pietrzykowski’s category was 54 kilos, and 75 kilos in Dunning’s.

In June 1940 Pietrzykowski had been on the first train convoy of 700 Polish political prisoners deported to Auschwitz — a former army barracks in the city of Oswiecim.

“So he was already very thin after eight months of backbreaking work and malnutrition,” Sobolewicz said. “He was the smaller of the two, but he was agile and fast. He had an incredible punch, aimed right for the stomach, and knew how to duck his opponent’s blows.

“He won the fight and got his bread and margarine. You have to admit that the Germans kept their promise.”

More fights were to follow.
Pietrzykowski threw himself into them, knowing full well that he risked death by starvation.
For his fellow inmates, every blow he struck was a source of pride and hope.

“We were elated. We said to ourselves, ‘As long as there’s a Pole punching a German in the face, Poland’s not finished’,” Sobolewicz said.
Pietrzykowski survived the war, passing away in 1991 in Bielsko-Biala in southern Poland. — AFP.