Antoni Dunin

Antoni Dunin (1907-1939) was a Polish noble (szlachta), a Hrabia (Count), and an army officer who received the prestigious Virtuti Militari award (similar to the American Medal of Honor).

Biography

Granówko Estate, Antoni's childhood home

Antoni was born on June 5, 1907, the youngest child of Lucia (Łucja) Taczanowska (1862-1917) and her second husband Count Rodryg Dunin (1870-1928). He grew up at the Granówko estate near Poznań, having six older siblings by his mother's first marriage to Stanisław Niezychowski, and two sisters and one brother via his own father Rodryg. When Antoni was a child, his elder brother Stanisław died in combat, and was then immortalized in the patriotic 1922 painting The Death of Stanisław Dunin by noted artist Wojciech Kossak. The Dunin family crest is the Łabędź (swan).

On December 28, 1933, Antoni married Zofia Helena Werner (1910-1939), daughter of Poland's vice-Finance Minister Edward Werner, and great-niece of the man who would become Saint Raphael Kalinowski. They had three children: Krystyna, Stanley (Stanisław, named after Antoni's older brother), and Magda (Magdelena). They lived near Poznań in the Bogusławice estate, a wedding gift from the bride's father, as the Granówko estate had gone to Antoni's older half-brother Jozef Niezychowski.

Antoni was killed in combat at the age of 32 on September 16, 1939, in Kampinoska Forest (Polish name: Puszcza Kampinoska), during the German blitzkrieg. His wife Zofia was also killed the next day, while fleeing in a different part of the forest, at the age of 29. Their three orphaned children survived by being shuffled from house to house during the war, until finally taking up residence at the estate of Jan Czarnowski (a Polish nobleman who was Papal chamberlain to Pope Pius XI, and head of the Polish Order of the Knights of the Maltese Cross), who was married to Zofia's aunt Helena (Lunia) Kalinowska. The children were eventually able to escape Poland to France, and then through the assistance of their mother's sister Maria Gabriela Werner (who had survived imprisonment at Auschwitz), their father's half-brother Count Alfred Niezychowski, and Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan, emigrated to the United States in the 1940s.

See also

• Alfred Niezychowski
• Edward Werner

References

• Family tree maintained by Antoni's granddaughter Elonka Dunin
• Recipients of the Virtuti Militari (Surnames starting with D)
• Unidentified paintings recovered from the Bogusławice estate
• (Polish wikipedia) Dunin