Anna and Julian Baran lived in Podole in the former Tarnopol Province. They had a farm in Gałk (or Gaik, as Gutman calls it), with the nearest big town being Brzeżany. The Jewish community of this small town, at the time of the outbreak of the War, was around 4,000.
Starting off in the Soviet zone of occupation, in 1941 Brzeżany was occupied by the Germans, who immediately began persecuting the Jewish people as well as mass executions. From this small town's ghetto, the Nazi's deported around 2,000 Jews in September and December 1942, to the Bełżec extermination camp. Those who remained were murdered on the spot in April and June 1943.
Probably, at the beginning of that year, Klara and Marek Zipper escaped from the Brzeżany ghetto and appeared at the Baran farm. The Baran's decided to take them in. The gave them a separate room and hid them until the end of the war, providing for their basic needs.
In a testimony, sent to the Jewish Historical Institute in 1983, the Zipper's wrote, "Anna and Julian Baran agreed to hide us in their property. They accommodated and cared for us in hiding until the end of the occupation (...) In our eyes, Mr and Mrs Baran were angels and the gratitude in our hearts will never fade” (Source: Edited by Michał Grynberg, The Book of the Righteous, Warsaw 1993).
