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War II, created a catalogue of the Polish underground press of 1939-1945
and developed the history of the collaborationist press (“gadzinówka”) in the
General Government published by the German propaganda machine. He
was also interested in the historiography of the Łódź ghetto. By the end of
the 1950s, he had drawn up and prepared excerpts from The Diary of Dawid
Sierakowiak for publication. He then went on to write an article about the
diary of Szłomo Frank. In 1963, together with Danuta Dąbrowska, he began
working on the full edition of The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto. Two volumes
were published and subsequent ones were in preparation, but then came the
anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 and they never saw the light of day. The Łódź
Publishing House, which had published The Chronicles, gave up this project.
In 1967, Lucjan Dobroszycki defended his doctorate, and in August 1968, in
protest against the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia, he left
the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) along with four academic researchers
of the History Faculty. Together with him, Krystyna Kersten and Bronisław
Geremek, among others, returned their party membership cards.
Felicja’s parents emigrated to Sweden. The Dobroszyckis delayed for a long
time, but eventually decided to leave Poland on 28 November 1969. They
settled in New York. Their Polish friends were afraid whether a historian
with a flair for archive work would manage on this new lifepath. “Without
knowledge of English, not being very resourceful and well into his forties,
Lucjan did not seem to be good material for an immigrant in the USA”, Jerzy
Jedlicki wrote in his memoirs. However, shortly after arriving in the United
States, Dobroszycki got a job at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New
York, where he catalogued and described a collection of several thousand
photographs documenting Jewish life in Poland from 1864 to 1939. Based
on these photographs, he and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet co-curated the
exhibition, “Image Before My Eyes” and produced the book with the same
title. He also published a major study entitled, Restoring Jewish Life in Post-
War Poland. In 1987, at Yale University Press, he published, The Chronicle of
the Lodz Ghetto, a one-volume selection of records from the ‘Daily Chronicle
Bulletin’. In 1985, Dobroszycki became the head of the department dealing
with the history of the Holocaust at Yeshiva University. In 1994, he received the
prestigious award of the Interfaith Committee of Remembrance in New York
for “(his) inexhaustible effort to document the truth about the Holocaust”. He
had a lot of work and academic plans. He died suddenly on 24 October 1995.
Felicja Dobroszycka lives and works in New York. She is still a librarian at Co-
lumbia University in Manhattan. Joanna Dobroszycka graduated in medicine
and is a doctor. Her children, the twins, Lucjan and Hania, are just starting
their studies. It was she who saw to it that her parents have their tree in the
Survivors’ Park.

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