In May of 1945 a German citizen named Werner Muller dictated an extraordinary document to an Australian lieutenant named Danny Hunter. Muller, who spoke English, French, and Italian, had been an interpreter for the Wermacht, the Nazi army under Heinrich Himmler. Ordered to Mauthausen in October of 1944, Muller’s job was to help with the interrogations of Allied prisoners. When Mauthausen was liberated, in May of 1945, Danny Hunter wrote down Muller’s account of his months in hell. Muller remembered one prisoner above all: Eddy Baranski.

Eddy and his radioman, Daniel Pavletich, had both been imprisoned and questioned first in Bratislava, where they told the Nazis they were American flyers. On arrival in Mauthausen, Pavletich was interrogated without incident, remembered Muller, but Baranski was a different story. Since this fellow seems to be so very clever, said the commandant, he deserves special treatment. This one we will hang.

“When Baranski saw [Nazi officers] all crowded in the room and the chain over the table,” remembered Muller, “he turned to me smiling and said I know what they are going to do now.

“They tied his hands behind his back,” remembered Muller, “and attached his wrists to the chain above, which they drew upwards. Although he must have been suffering terrible pain, he kept himself wonderfully. The Kommandant did not seem to like that and said I think the fellow still enjoys himself. They pulled his legs down so his whole weight was hanging on his arms. In the end he couldn’t stand it any longer. He cried and begged to be let down, but the Kommandant insisted on keeping him suspended in that dreadful position. My eyes were filled with tears. Baranski started praying and the Kommandant asked me what he was saying, and when I told him he and the other officers laughed. In the end however they let him down...”

His prayers, says Eddy’s daughter Kathleen — that’s my father’s second gift to me. At the very end of his tether, he prayed. To hear the depth and breadth of his faith, to know that now, after not knowing him for fifty years — that is a gift.

“He was completely broken,” remembers Muller. “His poor hands looked dreadful. He was offered some water but he had to hold it himself which he was incapable of doing with his hands. It was a terrible sight how he tried at first to sip some water with the bottle held between his arms. This was the most dreadful half hour I have ever been through in my life and I was ashamed to be there.”

And Muller remembers one more detail, before Eddy Baranski and ten American men and four British men and one Slovakian woman were executed naked in the basement with the fake camera; that when he offered Baranski a cigarette after his torture, Eddy grinned.

In August of 1999 Kathleen Baranski Lund and thirty of her family and friends were honored guests of the American Embassy in Bratislava, where her father had been interrogated by the Nazis. They visited Tri Duby, where the president of Slovakia dedicated a monument to Eddy Baranski and his fellow Allied soldiers who aided the 1944 rebellion against the Nazis. They went to Banska Bystrika, where Eddy Baranski is honored in the National Museum of Slovakia. They went to Piest, where Eddy was captured, and they went to the house where he was captured, and there they met Maria Lakotova, who wept when she remembered Kathleen’s father singing lullabies to her at night when she was a toddler in that house. And finally they went to Mauthausen, and prayed at the place where so many thousands of souls fled the earth.

Your father used to sing to me at night, Maria Lakotova told Kathleen. He would hold me on his knee and sing his songs. He was so kind and he had such a lovely voice. But I know he was not singing to me. He was singing to you, to his little girl far away.

His songs, says Kathleen — his songs are his final gift to me. It’s like I am finally hearing them after fifty years. I finally found my father. Now I know he never gave up, and he prayed, and he sang, and now he’s alive to me like he never was, not for fifty years. No one ever talked about him after he was murdered, so I never had a father at all. But now I do. Now I’ll have my dad forever and ever. It’s not sad. It’s joyous. It’s a miracle.

In 2004 the University of Portland admitted a young woman to the Class of 2008. Her name is Noel Peterson. She is from Shadow Hills, California. She wants to major in education. She is witty and cheerful and sparkling and lives in Shipstad Hall.

Her mother is Natalie Baranski Peterson. Her grandmother is Kathleen Baranski Lund. Her great-grandfather was a most remarkable young man, a devout youth with a lovely voice and a ferocious courage and an irrepressible belief that his brains and energy and creativity and finally his life could be brought to bear to destroy a foul empire that sought to enslave the world. His name was Eddy Baranski, and his story will never die again.

Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and the author of five collections of essays, most recently Leaping and Spirited Men. His new book, The Wet Engine, about the magic and muddle of hearts, will be published by Paraclete Press in May. He is also the editor of God Is Love, a collection of the best spiritual essays from this magazine (Augsberg Press), proceeds of which fund scholarships at the University.

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