When the German Reich invaded Poland in 1939, Maksymilian Boruchowicz, a journalist and author from Kraków, fled to Lwów (Poland, today Lviv, Ukraine). Starting in the fall of 1941, Boruchowicz, a Jew, had to live in the ghetto. In October 1942 he was put in the Janowska forced labor camp in Lwów, where he had to work for the German Armament Works (DAW). Boruchowicz joined a resistance group in the camp. In the fall of 1943, the Kraków section of Żegota (Council to Aid Jews) organized Boruchowicz’s escape from the camp. He traveled to Krakow using a false identity of Michał Borucki, a railway worker. With the support of Żegota he was able to help other Jewish prisoners escape from the Janowska camp. Under his assumed name, Boruchowicz took over command of a partisan unit of the Polish Socialist Party, which had meanwhile been declared illegal. Boruchowicz also gathered material about the mass murder of Jews in Poland.
After liberation he changed his name to Borwicz and led the Jewish Historical Commission in Kraków, which gathered reports of Holocaust survivors and supported the criminal prosecution of Nazi criminals. From 1947 on, he lived in France.