P.10 - Archive of Mark Dworzecki, physician, Vilna Ghetto underground member and researcher of Lithuanian Jewry during the Holocaust, 1945-1975

P.10 - Archive of Mark Dworzecki, physician, Vilna Ghetto underground member and researcher of Lithuanian Jewry during the Holocaust, 1945-1975
 
 Dr. Meier (Mark) Dworzecki was born in Vilna in 1908 and died in Tel Aviv in 1975. He completed his high school studies in Vilna, and was active in its public life. He wrote for the "Zeit" newspaper in Vilna, as well as for "Hazifira" and "Heint". He served as the chairman of the SSRP (Zionist Socialist Workers Party) from 1933, and worked as a physician in the Novogrod workers' suburb from 1935. In 1939, he was elected as the Jewish representative to the Vilna municipality.
 
 At the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the Polish Army as a physician and an officer. He was taken prisoner by the Germans, but he escaped near Krakow and returned to Vilna.
 
 During the Nazi occupation, he was one of the initiators of the Vilna underground (1941) and a member of "Yechiel's Struggle Group". He worked as director of the medical center for school children and as a physician in the ghetto Sanitary-Epidemology Department. In 1943 he was deported to concentration camps in Estonia, and from there to Germany. He escaped with a group from the Daustargan (?) camp to forests in the Saulgau (Germany) area (1945), and thus he survived.
 
 He moved to Paris in May 1945, and served as Chairman of the Sheerith Hapleta Union in France.
 
 Dr. Dworzecki made aliya to Israel in 1949, and worked as a physician; he served as Chairman of the Holocaust Survivor Physicians Association in Israel and as a member of the Yad Vashem board. In 1959 he was awarded the Holocaust Research Chair at Bar-Ilan University.
 
 Dr. Dworzecki published books, studies and articles on the Holocaust: "Jerusalem of Lithuania in Struggle and Death", "Between the Fragments" "Europe Without Children" and "Jewish Camps in Estonia, 1941-1944".
 
 There are 180 files in the Mark Dworzecki Archive including documentation from the years 1945-1975. The files have been arranged according to subject, and they deal with Dr. Dworzecki's various activities, including correspondence with personages and institutions, manuscripts of books, studies, articles and lectures. Dr. Dworzecki collected documentation from the Nazi period for his research.
 
 The task of cataloguing the Archive raised some difficulties due to the multiplicity of copies and drafts of studies, articles and manuscripts of books. It was decided to include two copies of every document in the Archive.
 
 Many books and publications from the Dworzecki Archive were transferred to the Yad Vashem Library.