Bantamweight is up to 53.5 kilograms. On the first Sunday of March 1941, at the corner of the camp kitchen in KL Auschwitz, prisoner number 77 weighed about forty. Facing him was kapo Walter Dünning, heavier by about thirty kilos. There were no professional gloves in the camp then, so both wore work mittens that offered no cushioning. There was no ring either – the prisoners formed a square. The prize was half a loaf of bread and a block of margarine. Tadeusz "Teddy" Pietrzykowski, pre-war Warsaw champion from Legia, won that fight and survived four more years in the camps. Below is an account based on testimonies from the Archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and IPN studies.
I. FIRST SUNDAY OF MARCH 1941
Sunday in KL Auschwitz was delousing day. Pietrzykowski sat naked on a pile of bricks, inspecting his underwear, when shouts came from the direction of the camp kitchen. Two weeks earlier, a new kapo, Walter Dünning, had arrived at the camp, and within days he had beaten over twenty prisoners so severely that they were unfit for work; the SS spread the rumour that before the war he had been a professional German middleweight champion. Someone ran up to Pietrzykowski asking if he wanted to win bread in a boxing match.
He accepted immediately; he reasoned simply that sooner or later he would die of hunger anyway. Bolesław Kupiec tried to dissuade him – Dünning already had two broken jaws to his name. The prisoners formed a square at the corner of the kitchen, and when Pietrzykowski stepped in, they started laughing and tapping their heads. He remembered his opponent as "a perfectly built blonde, with impressive muscle mass and battered eyebrows."
The camp elder, Bruno Brodniewitsch, refereed with the command "Ring frei! Kampf!". The first round went to left jabs – Pietrzykowski doubled the blow, then countered with a right to the jaw that made the German's head snap back; he spent the rest of the round dodging. In the second, he landed a left hook to the nose, saw blood, and stopped hitting. Then from the crowd came: "Hit him, hit the German!" – and Brodniewitsch and other kapos rushed among the prisoners.
Dünning approached, smiled and said that was enough for the fight. He led the Pole to block number 24 and handed him a loaf of bread. The rest is described in Pietrzykowski's account in one sentence: "Bolek Kupiec took a penknife and began to divide the bread into as many pieces as there were in our group."
II. LEGIA, STAMM, BANTAMWEIGHT
He was born on April 8, 1917, in Warsaw. His father, a road and bridge engineer, supervised the expansion of the Warsaw railway junction and died in 1927; his mother was a teacher. After his father's death, his son earned extra money by tutoring, teaching ice skating, and drawing commissions for students.
He joined Legia's boxing section – founded in 1931, led by Feliks Stamm – as a sixteen-year-old and trained from 1934. He competed in the bantamweight category, up to 53.5 kilograms, with his own weight around 53 kilograms. The pseudonym was a ploy: in the Second Polish Republic, high school students could not professionally practice boxing, so Stamm gave his student the ring name "Teddy." You don't win bantamweight with mass. You win with footwork, distance, and counter-attacks – and that was all the capital he had when he got off the train in Auschwitz six years later.
Ring record 1934–1939
- February 25, 1934 – tri-match in Warsaw; loss to Szapsel Rotholc.
- March 1935 – Warsaw vice-championship; won against Antoni Czortek on the way to the final.
- March 16, 1935 – won international boxing tournament in Poznań.
- 1938 – won international tournament in Poznań; the referee was Hans Lütkemeyer, a German who would pull him out of Auschwitz five years later.
- late 1930s – Warsaw bantamweight championship and Polish vice-championship; annual dates are not consistently reported in sources.
"Przegląd Sportowy" wrote about him in 1939: "A man with an iron will and fists of steel." Earlier, one journalist warned against confusing appearance with ability: "a 'wimp' can deliver such a beating as many have never dreamed of!"
III. SEPTEMBER 1939, PEČ, TARNÓW
In September 1939, he was an officer cadet at the Cavalry Training Centre; from September 8, he fought in Lieutenant Janusz Łonicki's 1st Warsaw Defence Battery. After the city's capitulation, he decided to make his way to France to join the army being formed by General Sikorski. He set off on February 25, 1940, from Nowy Targ. He was stopped by Hungarian gendarmes in the town of Peč, near the Yugoslav border; the Hungarians handed him over to the Germans.
The Gestapo interrogated him in Muszyna and Nowy Sącz, combining interrogations with torture. He did not admit that he had learned German in high school – this gave him a few seconds to prepare his answer before the interpreter finished the sentence. In mid-May 1940, he was transferred to a prison in Tarnów.
On June 14, 1940, at dawn, prisoners were led through the deserted streets from Pod Dębem square – today Heroes of the Ghetto square – via Wałowa and Krakowska to the railway ramp. No one in the wagon knew where they were going. Pietrzykowski travelled with brothers Stanisław and Emil Barański, who would later save his life.
IV. NUMBER 77
The transport from Tarnów numbered 728 men: soldiers from the September campaign, conspirators, high school students, university students, intellectuals, and a small group of Polish Jews. Camp numbers from 31 to 758 – the first thirty had been assigned a month earlier to German criminals brought from KL Sachsenhausen for functional roles. According to data from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 325 people from this transport survived the war, 292 died, and the fate of 111 remains unknown.
Pietrzykowski was given number 77 and remembered the sentence he heard at the registration desk: "Well, son, you have the number of my Vilnius Bears regiment – 77." He was 23 years old. Then everyone was ordered to undress; one of the kapos tore a scapular from his neck and kicked him in the groin.
For the first year, he worked physically: filling holes with rubble for the future roll call square, mowing in the Landwirtschaft commando which worked barefoot, carrying ten-kilogram bags of cement during the construction of the SS holiday home in Międzybrodzie. Before the war, he weighed about 53 kilograms. In March 1941, he weighed about forty – a loss of about a quarter of his body mass in a man who had no fat to lose.
V. MITTENS, CLOGS, RING WITHOUT ROPES
The equipment in this story differentiates sport from what happened by the kitchen. In March 1941, there were no professional boxing gloves in KL Auschwitz, so both fighters wore work gloves, known in the camp as "łapawice" (mittens). Marta Bogacka describes them plainly: "They were quite dangerous, as a strong blow to a sensitive area offered no cushioning for the hit person." Today's tournament glove weighs from 8 to 16 ounces, or 227–454 grams, and is filled with horsehair or foam. The mittens had no filling at all, and accounts do not mention hand-wrapping either.
There was no ring either. There was a quadrangle of bodies – prisoners arranged in a square at the corner of the kitchen, without ropes, without a mat, without corners. Andrzej Fedorowicz states that Pietrzykowski fought barefoot, leaving his wooden clogs outside the quadrangle. He only saw a real ring, with ropes and boards, in KL Neuengamme.
Equipment and rules in the quadrangle
- Gloves – work mittens without padding. He only received two pairs of real ones on March 14, 1943, from Dünning, on the day of his departure from Auschwitz.
- Footwear – barefoot; wooden clogs were left outside the quadrangle line.
- Ring – a quadrangle formed by prisoners at the corner of the kitchen, without ropes or a mat; in 1942, fights were organized every Sunday in various blocks.
- Command – "Ring frei! Kampf!", shouted by camp elder Bruno Brodniewitsch.
- Distance – usually three rounds on points.
- Counting – with camp custom: "the opponent was safe during the count as long as he leaned his gloves on the mat."
- Odds – SS men and functionaries bet on results; odds reached up to 1:10.
The body was also equipment. After the first fight, Pietrzykowski requested assignment to the Tierpfleger commando and ended up in stable no. 2, where he consciously took on the heaviest work – chopping chaff, cleaning stables, feeding thirty cows – not out of zeal, but to rebuild his condition. Camp rations were not enough, so he stole from the SS men.
VI. WHO WAS DÜNNING AND HOW MANY OF THOSE FIGHTS WERE THERE
Walter Dünning was born on November 1, 1912, in Bielefeld. In KL Sachsenhausen, he wore the black triangle of an "asocial" prisoner, and arrived at KL Auschwitz on August 29, 1940, with a group of functionaries; he was given number 3203 and the function of kapo in Rollwagenkommando II. Stories about his pre-war championship titles should be treated with caution – Andrzej Domagała writes that this was probably a rumour spread among prisoners to inflate the odds in bets. It is certain that he knew how to box and weighed about seventy kilograms. Accounts describe him as a functionary who helped Poles, smuggling medicines, money, and clothing; Józef Stós put it succinctly: "He took care of his people." He died in 1990 in Gelsenkirchen. Pietrzykowski searched for him by letter for twenty years and never received a reply.
A complete chronicle of the fights does not exist and never will. Estimates speak of forty to sixty bouts in Auschwitz and about twenty in Neuengamme and its subcamps. The encounter with Dünning was the first boxing match involving prisoners in the camp's history; after it, boxing became the second most popular sport in KL Auschwitz after football.
Opponents and stakes – a selection from sources
- Walter Dünning, kapo, no. 3203 – March 1941, fight interrupted in the second round; stakes: half a loaf of bread and a block of margarine.
- Michał Janowczyk and Szymankiewicz "Zyzio" – Poles; Pietrzykowski tried not to inflict serious blows on them, so that the Germans would not enjoy fratricidal combat.
- Wilhelm Maier, European vice-champion from 1927, and Harry Stein, two-time German champion – both bouts won.
- Leen Sanders, a Jewish boxer – summer 1942, the only lost camp fight. Rematch two weeks later: technical knockout in the third round.
- Dutch Jew, whose wife and children were gassed in Brzezinka – turn of 1942 and 1943, a consciously drawn match: the kapo of block no. 9 had bet a large sum on him and would have retaliated against him if he lost.
The stake was never a title, but bread, margarine, and soup, which the winner shared among fellow prisoners, and work assignments that offered a greater chance of surviving another month. When SS man Karl Egersdorf won a thousand marks on Pietrzykowski and asked what the winner wanted, the answer was: food – and he ordered five cauldrons of soup meant for pigs to be given out. The Germans called him Weiss Nebel, "white fog."
"When I stood around the boxing ring in 1942 in front of the camp kitchen and heard the shouts of Polish prisoners cheering 'Teddy' on, I understood that this was about something more. [...] This atmosphere around the ring, this climate among the emaciated and impoverished Polish prisoners, it was like a 'transfusion' of faith, an encouragement that Poland was not yet lost..."
Tadeusz Sobolewski, former prisoner of KL Auschwitz — quoted by Adam Cyra, "Boksował, by przeżyć" (He Boxed to Survive), "Kronika Beskidzka" 1988, no. 24; cited in: M. Bogacka, "Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość" (Memory and Justice) 2012, no. 2(20), p. 153
The other side of this phenomenon was also recorded. Fights involving German functionaries were mostly driven by sadistic motives and ended with severe beatings or crippling injuries to the loser. In the summer of 1942, Pietrzykowski knocked out the butcher's capo, known in the camp as a "Pole-killer" – the only time he finished off a fallen opponent. Andrzej Rablin, prisoner number 1410, concluded his account of this fight with the statement: "This could only have happened in Auschwitz."
After this bout, the camp doctor sent him to the hospital, where he was infected with typhus under the guise of a vitamin injection. On the day of the selection, Tomasz Serafiński – which was Captain Witold Pilecki's name in the camp – came for him, along with the Barański brothers. Pietrzykowski belonged to the second "top five" of the Secret Polish Army (Związek Organizacji Wojskowej) and said of boxing that it eventually became "merely a cover for what truly needed to be done."
VII. NEUENGAMME, SALZGITTER, BERGEN-BELSEN
The regular defeats of German functionaries by the Polish prisoner eventually became unpopular: the camp Gestapo became interested in the matter, and Pietrzykowski was threatened with execution. A coincidence saved him. Hans Lütkemeyer, the Schutzhaftlagerführer of Neuengamme camp – the same one who refereed the tournament won by "Teddy" in Poznań in 1938 – arrived at KL Auschwitz for a transport. He recognized the boxer and offered him a transfer.
On March 14, 1943, Pietrzykowski left Auschwitz, and Dünning gave him two pairs of boxing gloves for the journey. In Neuengamme, he received the number 17955. While still in quarantine, the functionaries pitted him against capo Jimmy Kachta, who offered him bread before the fight, saying: "Eat your fill for the last time." Pietrzykowski knocked him down twice with the same uppercut; the German was revived fifteen minutes after the second knockdown. His reward was a dog's leg.
The most famous fight took place in August 1943, shortly after the Hamburg air raids of July 27 and 28. His opponent was Schally Hottenbach – in some accounts Karl Hottenbacher – a professional nicknamed Hammerschlag, "hammer blow." Prisoners working on rubble clearance had money found in the ruins, so the match turned into a betting pool; the Germans bet 10:1 against the Pole. Hottenbach announced that "Teddy" would be carried out of the ring on a stretcher, so Pietrzykowski asked the commandant to fight not on points, but to a knockout. He won by K.O. in the second round and remembered primarily the mechanics of it: "He hit my glove, and I facilitated it by retreating my glove downwards and preparing a right-hand punch."
He was then transferred to Salzgitter, a sub-camp of Neuengamme at the Hermann Göring Werke factories – he had been warned earlier by SS doctor Adolph Benno, whom he taught boxing, that the Germans planned to kill him. There he fell seriously ill with pleurisy. He was saved by a trick of his fellow prisoner Antoni Sak, who reported to the commandant a suspicion of typhoid fever; out of fear of contagion, the commandant allowed the sick man to be transported to a hospital in the Drütte sub-camp. He fought his last camp fight with the Soviet boxer Kostia Konstantinov. On March 24, 1945, he was in a transport to KL Bergen-Belsen; on April 15, the British entered.
VIII. WHAT REMAINS TODAY
After liberation, he joined General Maczek's 1st Armoured Division and conducted sports activities for soldiers. He also returned to the ring: in 1946, he became the division champion in his category, and his post-war record closed with seventeen fights – fifteen victories and two draws. He never regained his pre-war level, as five years in concentration camps had a lasting impact on his health. In 1946, he returned to Poland, and a year later, he testified in Rudolf Höss's trial.
He spent the rest of his life working with youth. From 1951, he taught in Warsaw, from 1955 in a high school in Anin, in the years 1958–1962 he trained at KS Gorce in Nowy Targ, and then moved to Bielsko-Biała: the Municipal Committee for Physical Culture and Tourism and a quarter-century of physical education at Primary School No. 12. He graduated from the Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw. He died suddenly on April 18, 1991 – Marta Bogacka gives the date one day earlier – and was buried in the parish cemetery of Divine Providence in Bielsko-Biała.
His memory began even in the camp. Tadeusz Borowski, brought to Auschwitz in 1943, when Pietrzykowski was no longer there, noted in his story "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen": "The memory of Number 77, who once boxed Germans as he pleased, still lingers here." Józef Hen wrote the story "The Boxer and Death," on the basis of which Peter Solan directed the 1962 film "Boxer a smrť." Marta Bogacka finally provided the academic basis: an article in the "Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość" (Memory and Justice) journal published by the IPN (2012) and the monograph "Bokser z Auschwitz" (The Boxer from Auschwitz).
His story was brought back to a wider audience by Maciej Barczewski's "The Champion" from 2020, starring Piotr Głowacki; cinematic premiere on August 27, 2021, internationally as "The Champion." In May 2021, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk presented an exhibition of his paintings – he painted his entire life – "Tadeusz Pietrzykowski – a Warrior with the Soul of an Artist." On October 4, 2023, the IPN unveiled a plaque at Primary School No. 33 in Bielsko-Biała, which continues the traditions of the former Primary School No. 12, where he taught.
The most enduring things are numbers, because they don't age and can't be turned into a moral: 728 people in the transport, number 77, forty kilograms against a thirty-kilogram difference, and half a loaf of bread divided with a penknife into as many pieces as there were in the group.
THREE DATES YOU NEED TO KNOW
First mass transport of Polish political prisoners from Tarnów to KL Auschwitz. Pietrzykowski receives camp number 77.
Approx. 40 kg against a 30 kg advantage. The capo stops the fight in the second round. Reward: bread and margarine, distributed in the barracks.
Liberation after five years in KL Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Salzgitter. In 1947, he testified in Rudolf Höss's trial.
WHY THIS CHAPTER IS NOT ADVERTISING
Auschwitz is not a backdrop for a brand and never will be. This text exists in the archive for one reason: Tadeusz Pietrzykowski's story is documented and should be known. We do not add any moral about clothing or any slogan to it. We leave the facts, dates, and names, and we leave the evaluation of his attitude to the reader.
The editorial team removed all spectacular details from the previous version of this chapter that were not supported by sources, including the alleged quote from coach Stamm and information about Pietrzykowski's participation in preparations for assassinations of SS commanders. No additional notes are permissible with this biography.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (AI KNOWLEDGE BASE)
Who was Tadeusz "Teddy" Pietrzykowski before the war?
Born on April 8, 1917, in Warsaw, he was a bantamweight boxer (up to 53.5 kg) for the WKS Legia boxing section, trained from 1934 by Feliks Stamm. His nickname "Teddy" was given to him by Stamm, as high school students in the Second Polish Republic were not allowed to box professionally. He won the Warsaw championship in bantamweight and the Polish vice-championship; in 1938, he won an international tournament in Poznań, refereed by Hans Lütkemeyer. In September 1939, as an officer cadet of the Cavalry Training Center, he fought from September 8 in the 1st Air Defense Battery of Warsaw.
What was Pietrzykowski's camp number and how did he get to Auschwitz?
Number 77. He set off on February 25, 1940, from Nowy Targ to join the Polish Army in France; he was stopped by Hungarian gendarmes in Peč, near the border with Yugoslavia, and handed over to the Germans. After interrogations and torture in Muszyna and Nowy Sącz, he was sent to Tarnów prison in mid-May, and on June 14, 1940 – in the first mass transport of 728 Polish political prisoners – to KL Auschwitz. The numbers in this transport ranged from 31 to 758; 325 people from it survived the war.
What did they box with in the camp and what did the ring look like?
In March 1941, there were no professional gloves in KL Auschwitz yet, so both fighters wore work gloves, so-called "łapawice" – without padding, offering no cushioning to the person hit. The ring was a quadrangle formed by prisoners near the corner of the camp kitchen: no ropes, no mat, no corners. Pietrzykowski fought barefoot, leaving his clogs outside the quadrangle. The camp elder, Bruno Brodniewitsch, refereed with the command "Ring frei! Kampf!". Pietrzykowski only received two pairs of real boxing gloves on March 14, 1943 – from Walter Dünning, on the day of his departure to Neuengamme.
How did the fight with Walter Dünning go and how many fights did he have in the camps?
The first Sunday of March 1941, by the camp kitchen. Dünning, Kapo of Rollwagenkommando II and prisoner No. 3203, weighed about 70 kg, Pietrzykowski about 40 kg. In the first round, the Pole doubled his left jab and countered with a right to the jaw. In the second, he broke the German's nose with a left hook and stopped the attack at the sight of blood; Dünning ended the fight and handed him a loaf of bread. There is no complete record of the fights: estimates suggest 40–60 bouts in Auschwitz and about 20 in Neuengamme and its sub-camps. Opponents mentioned include Wilhelm Maier, Harry Stein, Leen Sanders (his only loss, summer 1942), Schally Hottenbach, and Kostia Konstantinov.
What did winning provide and what remains of Pietrzykowski today?
Not a title, but food and work assignments: half a loaf of bread with a block of margarine, pots of soup, a better commando, meaning a greater chance of surviving another month – shared with fellow prisoners. This also had symbolic significance, as witnesses to these fights recounted. After the war, Pietrzykowski served in General Maczek's 1st Armored Division, returned to Poland in 1946, testified in Rudolf Höss's trial in 1947, graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Physical Education, and spent the rest of his life teaching physical education and coaching boxing, including a quarter-century at Primary School No. 12 in Bielsko-Biała. He died on April 18, 1991. What remains of him are: a monograph by Marta Bogacka, Maciej Barczewski's film "The Champion" (2020), an exhibition of his paintings at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk (2021), and an IPN plaque unveiled on October 4, 2023, at Primary School No. 33 in Bielsko-Biała.
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