Chicagoan Richard M. Barancik, who was the last surviving member of “the Monuments Men,” a group that recovered millions of pieces of art that had been looted by the Nazis, has died.
“It’s a bittersweet moment that we knew was going to come, and we’ve arrived there. It’s done,” said Robert M. Edsel, founder and head of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation and author of “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” which was the basis for a movie starring George Clooney.
Mr. Barancik died July 14 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital after a brief and sudden illness. He was 98.
“We are within a handful of years of living in a world without any World War II veterans. ... It truly is the passing of a generation,” Edsel said.
About 350 men and women from 13 nations served in the group largely made up of academics and art historians and other antiquities experts.
But at the end of the war, as the group began to discover the castles, salt mines and caves filled with millions of looted artworks, they realized it needed soldiers to transport the art and guard it — and that’s what Mr. Barancik did.
Mr. Barancik was 20 and volunteered after learning about the special unit. He served for three months with the group, which was officially known as the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program under the Civil Affairs and Military Government sections of the Allied armies. The majority of its members were American or British.
When Edsel first reached out to interview Mr. Barancik in 2006, he was a bit baffled.
“He was humble to the point of ‘I don’t understand why you even want to talk to me.’ I don’t think he had an appreciation of how his work fitted into the larger picture,” Edsel said.
His daughter Jill Barancik said, “He just felt like he was such a small part of it, he was embarrassed at being held up as a hero when he was not a hero.”
When he was invited to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to receive a Congressional Gold Medal alongside three other members of the group; Mr. Barancik didn’t initially want to attend.
“We persuaded him. But in the end, he was really pleased he went. I think he reconciled the fact that he was there representing people who couldn’t be there. He called himself ‘The Last Man Standing,’” his daughter said.
“He loved his time in the Army, the marching, the food. I’m not kidding. He’d tell about an encounter with Gen. George Patton, where he drove by in a Jeep as my dad was reading a book under a tree with his helmet off and Patton yelled ‘Soldier! Put on your goddamn helmet!’”
Mr. Barancik was lucky to have survived the war.
On Christmas Eve 1944, he was aboard a ship crossing the English Channel with his infantry regiment when a neighboring transport ship, the S.S. Leopoldville, was sunk by a torpedo launched from a German submarine. More than 700 American soldiers died in the attack.
After the war, Mr. Barancik studied architecture at Cambridge University and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau. He returned home to continue his studies at the University of Illinois and later partnered with one of his teachers, Richard Conte, to form the architecture firm Barancik Conte & Associates.
Mr. Barancik designed private homes, office buildings and campuses, and distinctive high-rises that dot the Chicago skyline, including 990 N. Lake Shore Drive, 100 E. Bellevue Place, 1310 N. Ritchie Court, 1212 N. Lake Shore Drive, Eugenie Terrace at 1730 N. Clark and 211 E. Ontario St.
Mr. Barancik loved tennis and drawing political cartoons that he’d send to friends and family, often skewering politicians on both sides of the aisle. He drew his last one three days before his death.
He grew up in the South Shore neighborhood, lived most of his adult life on the Near North Side and loved spending time along the rocky coastline of the Monterey Peninsula in California.
Mr. Barancik’s father, Dr. Henry Barancik, ran a hospital division in France during World War I and was chief of staff at Jackson Park Hospital and South Chicago Hospital.
In addition to Jill, Mr. Barancik is survived by his sons Robert and Michael and daughters Cathy B. Graham and Ellie Barancik, as well as four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
A private celebration of life is being planned.
