Lucjan Dobroszycki

Lucjan Dobroszycki (January 15, 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.

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."

Dobroszycki was born in Łódź to Fiszel and Gitla (Minska) Dobroszycki.

He married Felicja Herszkowicz and had one child, Joanna.

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-to-day record of life in the second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi Europe.

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."

Lucjan Dobroszycki was posthumously awarded Polityka magazine's Historical Award for the year 2006, on the 50th anniversary of its inauguration.