The wartime fate of Aleksander Prusiewicz and his “Diary from the Events of the Second World War 1939-1941”

The article presents the last years of the life of Aleksander Prusiewicz (1878-1941), an ethnographer, sightseer, collector, curator of the Volyn Museum in Lutsk, organiser and manager of the Lviv Ethnographic Museum. From 1 September 1939, he kept a diary, describing, among many other things, the siege of Lviv, the first days of Soviet occupation as well as the worsening living conditions in the city. He devoted most of his attention to the arrest of the former Prime Minister of Poland, professor of archeology, Leon Kozłowski, which he provoked on 26 September 1939. In the next months, Prusiewicz limited keeping his diary to laconic notes. In the spring of 1940, he made efforts to obtain PhD at the Ivan Franko State University of Lviv, which ended in failure. He returned to systematic diary-keeping after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, bringing his notes until 13 August 1941. Three weeks later, on 6 September 1941, he committed suicide. He was buried in the Łyczakowski cemetery