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Note: Mieczyslaw [Wiezislaus aka Minio] von Brezany, born in Rzeszow, Poland in 1882. He graduated as a civil engineer in Vienna; served in Vienna at the Royal Railways. After the partition of Austria, in World War I, he was forced to retire as Commissioner of Railroads after only 17 years of service. ("After my retirement I was not able to get a job in the industry or any where else." he wrote in 1960, " Today my wife and I live a very secluded and modest life, quiet and contented.") His wife was an Austrian named Risa. They had no children.
In 1969 in Vienna, they had a very modest, somewhat overly furnished apartment, on Waldvogelstrasse. They were gracious hosts despite not having been expecting a visitor from America whose German, spoken haltingly and with extremely limited vocabulary and in the present tense only, attempted to identify him as a relative. Later, Minio shared a bottle of wine with Eugene, as they sat admiringly before a large oil painting of a female nude draped upon a divan, a la the Madame Recamier school, hanging over a mantle piece in the dining room. Despite wearing a three piece suit and tie upon the unexpected occasion of the visit, Minio's foot was bandaged to treat his gout, to such an extent that walking outdoors was impossible; so only Eugene and Risa went out for a walk during a blizzard (with paths cut through to clear the side walks of five foot drifts] in the city, to visit a neighbor who spoke English as well as German and could translate otherwise unintelligible dialogue.
Minio died in 1969, about six weeks after a visit from grand-nephew Eugene Brezany; Risa passed on some years later, sometime after 1976.
A German woman who was working as a cashier at a U.S. Army facility, where Eugene was stationed in Swetzingen, Germany, upon reading a copy of Mieczyslaw's death notice, which she had been asked to help interpret, said in some astonishment: "Oh, he was a very high man ...."
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