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= Maria Dworzecka = Maria Dworzecka (born on June 19th, 1941) is a Jewish Polish-American Holocaust survivor.

Early Life
Maria Dworzecka was born as Marysia Rozenszajn to her birth parents, Izak Rozenszajn and Bela Kaufman Rozenszajn. Her family had recently fled German occupied Warsaw for Soviet occupied Białystok, where Maria was born. Shortly after she was born, German forces began to invade the Soviet Union. Her father, Izak, was killed in the first bombing of Białystok.

Maria and her mother, Bela, forcedly lived in the Białystok ghetto for two years after her father passed. In 1943, Bela obtained false documents that let her identify as Paulina Pakulska, a Catholic Polish woman. The false identity provided her a way to escape the ghetto with Maria and find a job in Tykocin. When Maria was two and a half, Bela was arrested in a street roundup targeting Polish partisans. Separated from her mother, Maria was alone in the streets until a Polish couple risked their lives to take her in. Lucyna and Wacław Bialowarczuk sheltered Maria until the end of the war. After the Soviet Invasion in 1944, Maria no longer had to conceal her Jewish identity. In 1946, Bela returned to Tykocin after being liberated. Bela and Maria moved back to Warsaw together after reuniting, but kept in touch with Maria’s rescuers. They lived in Warsaw for 2 years, until Bela was killed in a traffic accident in 1948. Later that same year, Maria was adopted by Polish Jewish couple, Alicja Dworzecka and Arkadiusz Dworzecki. She later attended universities in Poland and obtained degrees in physics.

Immigration
Around 1968, there was political unrest in Poland again that threatedned Maria and her family through antisemitic violence. Instead of hiding out with her previous rescuers again who offered to hide her, Lucyna and Wacław Bialowarczuk; Maria decided to immigrate to the United States.

Research
Maria’s primary research area was nuclear physics. Maria helped obtain an NSF grant, Consortium to Develop Computer Software for Upper Level Undergraduate Physics, to enhance the physics department. She was a co-principal investigator on this grant that gained funding yearly starting in 1990. She has helped author several physics books including Binding energy of ⁸H with tensor forces and hard shell repulsion and Binding energy of 3H n-d doublet scattering length with rank four separable potential.

Later Life
After her arrival to the United States, Maria became a physics professor. In 1983, she began working as a professor in the physics and astronomy departments at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Maria is now retired and holds the title of Professor Emeritus.

There is also a documentary about her and her daughter called “Maria i Anna” that plays in a Tykocin museum.

Maria did not find out there was a group for people who were very young and survived the Holocaust until much later in her life, but has since then enjoyed being able to talk and share experiences. She now volunteers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.