Marek Liwszyc was the son of Joseph Liwszyc and Eidia Berenzon (b. 1889). He was born on June 28, 1915 in Ostrog in eastern Poland. Joseph, a pharmacist, passed away in 1919 when Marek was only four years old. Eidia then supported her son as a teacher. Marek also became a teacher, and in August 1937 he married another teacher, Lucy Elka (Ela), b. 1916. Following the start of World War II, Ostrog fell under the Soviet zone of occupation. Sometime in 1941, Lucy gave birth to a son, Joseph Lazar who they named in memory of Marek's father. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Marek was conscripted into a building battalion of the Soviet army in Ural Mountains while his wife and child were trapped under Nazi rule. After his release from the army he became the director of an orphanage for Polish children modeled on Janusz Korczak's institution. After the war he learned that Lucy and Joseph were both deported and killed in 1942 near Lwow. Marek's mother Eidia perished in a shooting Aktion in Ostrog on August 4, 1941. For several years, Marek lived in Kiev where he remarried Vera German, a Polish-Jewish nurse in the Red Army, before being repatriated to Poland.
Consists of one typed memoir, 72 pages, entitled"Mark Liwszyc, 1915-2003, Selected Memoirs" written by Mark Liwszyc, originally of Ostrog, Poland (currently, Ostorh, Ukraine), and compiled by his daughter, Edith. The memoir is written in three sections. Section one includes the history of the Jewish community of Ostrog and Mr. Liwszyc's memories of his own childhood. Section two covers the period of 1939-1941, including the Soviet occupation of Ostrog, traveling to Lwow to continue his education, working as a teacher in the Soviet schools, the German invasion in 1941, and being forced to march east into the Soviet interior. In section three, 1956-1957, Mr. Liwszyc describes his life in the Soviet Union and the bureaucratic steps needed to visit old friends in Poland.
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Copyright Holder: Dr. Edith L. Cohen
Mark Liwszyc, 1915-2003, Selected Memoirs
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum