Group photograph in front of the stairs of St Peter and St Paul's Cathedral in Zawiercie

Photo (on a cardboard support – its border was originally much larger, probably decorative) of fourteen men, most likely belonging to the elite of Zawiercie. The city was an important Silesian industrial centre of the Second Polish Republic; the photographed men are, as it can be assumed, representatives of mainly the technical intelligentsia: industrialists; however, also priests are pictured (incidentally, this is a photograph of men only, there is not a single woman in it). They stand on the steps of St Peter and St Paul's Cathedral in Zawiercie Among them, Józef Mamelok, second from the left in the middle row (indicated by an arrow in the lower part of the photo and in the description on the back), commercial director of the Zawiercie Joint Stock Society. The first from the left – as indicated by Halina Mamelok (Kamińska) née Baruch on the reverse – is Ignacy Banachiewicz (1875-1940), a mechanical engineer who was the head of the Line Shaft and Machine Factory and Iron Foundry Krawczyk and Co. in Zawiercie (Fabryka Pędni, Maszyn i Odlewnia Żelaza Krawczyk i S-ka; later, in the 1930s, Banachiewicz's surname was integrated in the name of the plant which became a joint-stock company; the factory exists to this day, under the name of Zafama); Banachiewicz died during World War II in the Dachau camp. He was a brother of Tadeusz Banachiewicz, an outstanding professor of astronomy at the Jagiellonian University (1882-1954), whose inventions included the chronocinematograph (in the 1920s ), used to study such phenomena as solar eclipses (see the cover of 'Urania' magazine 1954, No. 12 (www.urania.edu.pl/sites/default/files/archiwum/urania_1954_12.pdf, accessed: 28 January 2021). Incidentally, it was precisely in Zawiercie that the device was made. | PK