O.62 - Borwicz Collection: Testimonies recorded by the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland

O.62 - Borwicz Collection: Testimonies recorded by the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, 1944-1947
 
 Michal Borwicz (Maksymilian Boruchowicz) was born in Krakow in 1911, and died in Paris in 1987. A graduate of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, he was a Jewish Polish author and historian, who studied the history of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust. Borwicz was an inmate in the Janowska camp in Lwow from 1942-1943. He was sentenced to death by hanging, however when the sentence was being carried out, the rope broke. He escaped from the camp and joined the partisans and commanded an Armia Krajowa (AK) unit in the Krakow area. After the war, he headed the Jewish Historical Commission in Krakow from 1945 to 1947. After emigrating to France in 1947, he directed the Centre d'etude de l`histoire des Juifs (Polonais) (Center for Research of the History of the Jews of Poland) in Paris until his death; Borwicz contributed his archival collection to Yad Vashem.
 
 Collection of testimonies:
 Immediately after the liberation, all the branches of the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland began to collect testimonies in order to document the Holocaust of the Jews of Poland. Some of the testimonies were collected as early as April 1945. Most of the collection consists of testimonies of surviving Jews from all sections of the population. The testimonies document all aspects of the Nazi period from the earliest days of the German occupation: riots; the behavior of the local population; the ghettoization process; ghetto life; deportation to the camps; liquidation "Aktions" and mass murder within the ghettos and at the killing pits; survival of Jews using false identities on the Aryan side; hiding in cities, villages and forests; fighting as partisans; the Jewish underground with all its variations and resistance to the Germans; labor camps and death camps inside and outside of Poland; death marches.
 
 The collection also includes testimonies of children who were toddlers at the time of the German occupation, and lost their families during the war, as well as testimonies regarding war criminals, Germans and people of other nationalities that were gathered as legal documentation. A small portion of the testimonies were taken from Poles who described the experiences of their Jewish neighbors, or who were eyewitnesses to mass murders carried out against the Jews.
 
 The collection reflects the destruction of Jewish life in the small villages, the towns and the big cities as well as the experiences of Jews who were inmates in labor camps, concentration camps, and death camps.
 
 Included in the documentation:
 - Interviews with members of the Historical Committees;
 
 - Independent records of experiences from the war period, some of which were written down at the actual time the events took place and made it through the war along with the survivors;
 
 - Diaries and excerpts from memoirs, plays, poems and songs integrated into testimonies.
 
 There are testimonies given anonymously, and testimonies recorded during the war, sometimes just before the death of the anonymous witness, that were found after the war.
 
 The Jewish Historical Commission continued to record testimonies through its regional branches until 1952.