Name Lucjan Dobroszycki Role Scientist | Movies Image Before My Eyes | |
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Died October 24, 1995, New York, United States People also search for Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Joshua Waletzky, Jerome Badanes Books Image Before My Eyes, The Chronicle of the Lod, Survivors of the Holocaus | ||
Lucjan Dobroszycki (1925 – October 24, 1995 in New York City) was a Polish scientist and historian specializing in modern Polish and Polish-Jewish history. A survivor of the Łódź Ghetto and Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz, Dobroszycki lived in Poland after World War II where he obtained his education and worked as a historian. His main focus was the Nazi German occupation of Poland.
Contents
Dobroszycki undertook studies of the – legal and illegal – Polish press from during the war, edited an abridged version of the chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto (Litzmannstadt Ghetto), and conducted research on the extermination of Polish Jewry. He was a visiting scholar in Jerusalem in June 1967 and emigrated to the United States in 1970. He and his family settled in New York City where, for the remainder of his life he was a member of the research staff of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He was also affiliated with Yeshiva University's Holocaust studies program.
According to Zachary Baker from Stanford, Dobroszycki became YIVO's "'research consultant to the stars'; he compiled a history of former New York mayor Ed Koch's ancestors and was a consultant to Barbra Streisand's film production of "Yentl" (an indirect Yiddish connection). His name has appeared in numerous published acknowledgments and documentary film credits."
The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto
One of Dobroszycki's crowning achievements as a historian was the publication of the collected accounts of Jewish life under the Nazi occupation of Łódź, a day-by-day record of life in the second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi Europe. In the Chronicle, the positive references to Poles living outside the ghetto far exceed negative ones. Under May 20, 1942 for example the Chronicle reads:
"The civilian population [..] particularly the Poles, were very favorably inclined toward the Jews and, in large measure, the Jews from Brzeziny owe them their lives. They tell of one baker who baked a special quota of bread for the Jews, which he would have little children bring into the ghetto. The little children would bring one batch of bread into the ghetto, and then, before anyone knew it, they'd be back with another. Aryan friends would pass the Jews bacon, meat, and other products through the ghetto fence, more often than not without being paid for it... anti-Semitism seemed to have vanished completely there." (p. 183).
Only two of five projected volumes were published before Dr. Dobroszycki moved to New York in 1970. The first English translation of "The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto" was published by Yale University Press in 1984. In his review, Stefan Kanfer of Time.com reflected on the collected accounts:
"Within the barbed-wire boundaries a microcosm arose... Children were born, stores were opened, a road constructed, hospitals set up, administrators employed, records kept. It is these records, miraculously preserved in private libraries and underground caches, that provide the first detailed portrait of a Holocaust society. In The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, Editor Lucjan Dobroszycki, a survivor, presents an eerie and horrific scene told in terse entries, like a nightmare dreamed in pieces."
Polish award
Lucjan Dobroszycki was posthumously awarded Polityka magazine's Historical Award for the year 2006, on the 50th anniversary of its inauguration.