If it could speak, the dusty accordion sitting in a storage archive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum would tell a tale of hunger, deprivation and death.
Its yellow keys might play a reedy tune, a Polish folk song, perhaps, to remind the listeners of brave men and women who fought back in September 1939 when German tanks rolled across Poland's stubbled fields. Its cracked bellows might wheeze out a breath of hope in times of destruction and despair.
Instead, the accordion has been silent for more than two decades and it may fall to a Coquitlam teenager to finally tell its story.
Vincent Belair, a Grade 10 student at Dr. Charles Best secondary school, was one of 27 students from Best and Port Moody secondary who toured the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum, the notorious death camp in Poland, during a spring break trip to Europe.
It was a moving experience for Belair and, what's more, he may have found a piece of his family's history.
'YOU GOT CHILLS'
According to Belair, the visit to Auschwitz was one of the most emotional moments on the eight-day trip through Germany and Poland that took in sites of key historical significance to the 21st century. While at the sprawling former death camp, Belair and his schoolmates swept walkways and shovelled snow but they also toured the place and got to know its history.
Belair recalls that he wore shorts, a t-shirt and a hoodie even though it was cold because he wanted to feel what it was like to live there, even during the darkest of winters.
"I wanted the full experience of what it would have been like every day living in Auschwitz," Belair said. "You got chills there just walking around, knowing that you were in a place where people got killed."
His approach was not that of a typical tourist, his interest acutely personal.
Belair's mom's family is from Poland and his great uncle, Jan Baraniok, was a prisoner at the camp. It's a fact of life for Belair that Auschwitz is part of his Polish heritage and while some students cried during the visit and some were stoic, Belair said he felt a connection to the place.
"I felt proud because my uncle saved a bunch of people."
TAKING CHANCES
Belair's family has few official records and the details are scarce but what is known is that on Dec. 18, 1940, Baraniok was a member of the Polish resistance who was captured and placed in a Polish army barracks in the town of Oswiecim. He was given prisoner number 7649, according to prison records, tattooed and sent to work alongside other members of the resistance and intelligentsia in the camp that came to be known as Auschwitz.
Baraniok was just 26 years old and records show he lived at the camp from December 1940 to Jan. 25, 1945. That terrible winter, Baraniok was one of thousands of men and women evacuated from the camp and transported to Mauthausen, another huge concentration camp, deep in the heart of the Third Reich.
As the Soviet Red Army was bearing down on the Nazis, Baraniok was rousted from the barracks, corralled into the lengthy lines of prisoners walking six abreast and likely taken to Wodzislaw, to a train station where he was probably transferred to an open rail car for the trip south to Mauthausen.
Among the thousands of sick or starving prisoners who were transferred to other concentration camps that winter, he survived.
But eventually, Baraniok arrived at Mauthausen, another network of concentration camps, where he became prisoner number 117534. It would be another three months of misery before he was finally liberated by the U.S. Army on May 6, 1945.
Nobody knows what Baraniok did during those terrible years or how he was able to endure the transformation of Auschwitz from a prison camp to a death camp where more than a million people lost their lives. He was just another slave labourer among thousands but he never said a word about his travails or what atrocities he might have seen.
"It was too painful," says Ted Trochta, Belair's grandfather. "We had other people we knew who didn't survive Auschwitz. It's not something you really like to talk too much about."
THE ACCORDION
There was, however, one story that Baraniok was prepared to share with his family, Trochta said, and it's the tale of how he used his accordion to smuggle food to his comrades.
"I don't know what kind of orchestra he was involved in but, as far I remember, he played for those guards, the people who were in charge during some gatherings where they served food. I remember my uncle mention that there were times when they were sometimes high on alcohol," Trochta said.
Baraniok must have been daring to snatch food behind the backs of drunken officers. Had he been successful, he would have been considered a hero. Had he failed, he would have been shot.
But the Polish prisoners had a reputation for being scrappy, some even carrying out resistance activities at the camp. Quite likely, Baraniok was cut from the same cloth and took those chances so others would live.
But as to how Baraniok acquired the accordion or managed to keep it during the long death march, it's hard to know. The details, left unspoken, have since faded with time.
"There was so many things going on at end of the war, crazy situations," Trochta says. "All those things, they were not so important. What was important that people survived."
One day, according to family legend, Baraniok simply showed up with the accordion on his back. He looked like a chimney sweep carrying his tools, one cousin remembers to this day.
For Belair, the stories of his great uncle are inspiring and he would like to believe that, faced with such an horrific situation, he would be just as brave.
"Would I have the guts to do what he did?" he muses. "I don't know. Would I be one of the people who were just working and trying to survive, or would I have been one to help people?"
Since the trip, Belair has asked himself such questions and hope he lives up to his family heritage. As for the accordion, Belair may have unearthed it and he's proud of that accomplishment.
Like many old things, the accordion disappeared but many in the family believe it was donated to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in the 1990s.
Belair searched it out on his trip to Auschwitz with the help of his teacher, Megan Leslie, and he was surprised by what he found. Told not to expect too much because such an inquiry had never been made before, Belair and Leslie were pulled away from the tour group and ushered into a building full of old objects covered in white cloth.
There, in a black box, was an old accordion that may have belonged to Jan Baraniok.
Belair examined it and was silent - a rare thing for him. Was this his great uncle's instrument? What stories did it have to tell?
There were no records to prove it was his family's missing heirloom; it was just one item among thousands stored at the museum.
But the story of the accordion and how it may have saved people's lives and given them hope, music and even food, is still a story worth telling.
Students attending the Europe trip organized by Social Justice 12 teacher Ken Ipe will be putting together albums of their photos and some are likely to present them to the board of education in the near future.
