Aleksander Dyzenhaus (born c1923), the donor's father, was resident in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, where he wrote to his friend, Richard Pipes. The Pipes family had left Poland initially for Rome where they eventually obtained US visas, and they settled in the US where Pipes became Professor of Soviet History at Harvard. In his autobiography, “Vixi :Memoirs of a Non-Belonger”, Professor Pipes describes how his father procured a passport and transit visa for Aleksander Dyzenhaus, which he was unable to use as he could not secure the necessary German permit before the Italians stopped issuing entry visas. The letters are nearly all in Polish and in manuscript. A few are in German and Professor Pipes stapled envelopes bearing a stamp, “Geoffnet OberKommando Wehrmacht “, to some of the letters. Some years before his death in May 2018, Professor Pipes entrusted the file to the donor's brother, Professor David Dyzenhaus. Aleksander Dyzenhaus and his mother survived the war by obtaining false papers to enable them to escape the Ghetto and go into a succession of temporary hiding places in the Aryan district from December 1942 until August 1943, and then outside Warsaw until January 1944 when the Soviet army took the locality of Brwinow where he was living at the time.
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Aleksander Dyzenhaus collection