Mieczysław Jan Gębarowicz (17 December 1893 – 18 February 1984) was a Polish art historian, soldier, dissident, museum director and custodian of cultural heritage.

During and after the war, Gębarowicz secretly organised the dispatch of items from the collections of the Ossolineum to safety in Kraków and Wrocław.

In February 1952 he was dismissed as a director by the Soviet authorities, but was allowed to work in Lviv as a research librarian.

In 1912 Mieczysław completed his schooling at Buczacz Lyceum and was already a member of two clandestine Polish youth organizations, "Zet" and Zarzewie.

In 1922 he took up a post in the National Ossoliński Institute, known as the Ossolineum in Lwów, where the following year he was promoted to curator of the Lubomirski Museum [pl].

In December 1939 the Soviet authorities had installed the Polish Communist activist Jerzy Borejsza as director.

Included were works by the Polish poet, playwrights and authors Juliusz Słowacki, Aleksander Fredro, Władysław Reymont, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Adam Mickiewicz.

The original manuscript of Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz was despatched from Lviv, as well as 2,400 Polish publications and prints, and several hundred coins.

[4] 1946 saw Gębarowicz become deputy manager of the Faculty of Theory and History of Art of the renamed Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.

[7] Gębarowicz wrote research papers, despite his straitened circumstances and a lack of access to the Ossolineum sources.

[citation needed] Aside from his scholarly work, it is probably due to his leadership, determination and guile in wartime, the Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), during the Fourth Partition and after, that a major part of Polish cultural heritage survived and was made available to succeeding generations.