An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996

Anna Müller's new biography of Tonia Lechtman powerfully reminds us why the twentieth century was, as Eric Hobsbawm called it, the era of extremes. Lechtman's path was in many ways related to that of Hobsbawm, as a Jewish, communist, and profoundly transnational biography. But, unlike Hobsbawm, Lechtman lived a leftist life without having studied at university or leading lengthy intellectual debates with fellow communists. As such, and as a woman, we would probably not find Lechtman as a subject of history, let alone of a major monograph. Showing that Lechtman is worthy of having a book written about her is Müller's feminist subversive act—and one of the many that we need to congratulate her for. Müller's book will be useful to a great many readers, from a reader interested in Jewish history to a graduate student looking for observations on biographies, but, I assume, the most grateful readership will be that of feminist and radical history.Tonia Lechtman née Bialer was born in Łódź to a well to do family in 1918. She attended a girls’ high school, which is where she became politicized. She was expelled, and in 1935, her family moved to Palestine. Here, she met her future husband, the one-year older Sioma Lechtmann, whose family was originally from Podolia and who grew up in Vienna. Sioma was a far more conventional ideologue, having studied the classical Marxist authors such as Stalin, Lenin, Marx himself, and Hegel. Tonia and Sioma engaged in various communist activities such as leafleting that the Mandate authority had deemed illegal, and soon they were deported out of the country. They decided to go to France since communist deportees were accepted there. Tonia lived a penniless life in Paris, soon with a baby daughter, supported by other communist emigres (largely Germans), while Sioma went to Spain to join the International Brigades. With the dissolution of those groups one year later, he ended up, like so many, in the infamous French internment camps. Sioma was unable to get out, and as a Jew, he was sent to Auschwitz in 1942; he was murdered just before the liberation. In 1939, Tonia moved to Southern France to be near her husband. They conceived one more child, a boy, and without the Paris system of fellow leftist emigrés, Tonia had an even harder time. Still, she continued to follow the rigid worldview of communism as formulated by her husband, which at one point even meant cutting off one of her few remaining friends on sight—because her husband was a Troskyite.In 1942, with her husband deported to what she did not yet know to be Auschwitz, Lechtman escaped to Switzerland with her two little children and an infant orphan she took under her wing. Unlike Saul Friedländer's parents who attempted to cross nearby only to be sent back to Nazi occupied France, Lechtman was correctly informed that she would be able to stay in Switzerland if accompanied by the children. For the following three years in Switzerland, Lechtman and her children lived in a series of refugee camps. Lechtman was increasingly aware that as a refugee and a woman she was always seen as a foreign burden, independent of how much she worked and contributed. She was to be grateful and dependent, a topic that historians of Jews in hiding in the Holocaust have been focusing on recently.1 During these years, Lechtman gained experience in social work with children. Müller's discussion of the Swiss intermezzo shows the emergence of an independent woman, one who started understanding her Jewishness was as important as her communism.Those two identities were to become crucial in the years to come. Lechtman chose to return to Poland and set out to build socialism as a social worker for orphaned children. But in 1950, she was arrested, as a Jew with links to Noel Field and the International Brigades, and spent the next five years in prison. (Müller first came across Lechtman while researching her classic study of women prisoners of the Stalinist era).2 She emerged with diminished health, and cracked, though still standing. In 1968, following the campaign of antisemitism, Lechtman's children emigrated to Israel, together with tens of thousands of other Polish Jews; Lechtman followed and lived with her daughter in Tel Aviv until her death in 1996. She continued her life as a Polish communist, with a portrait of Rosa Luxemburg adorning the wall.Müller tells a story of a woman politicized in her teens, willing to suffer for her political beliefs, indeed, a woman whose entire life is reshuffled due to communism—and not for the better, in terms of security, social esteem, or even economic wellbeing. Here, Müller's book makes an important contribution to the history of Central European communists, who were so often Jewish. She thus joins scholars like Jaff Schatz, Catherine Epstein, Josie McLellan, Marci Shore, Michal Kopeček, and Katherine Lebow.3 It is a vast historiography, but Müller's nuanced reading of Lechtman's life offers critical insights on the nature of ideology. First, Lechtman was a tough and dedicated communist—she remained one even after the emigration to Israel (whereas Catherine Epstein's members of the East German Central Committee sometimes reinvented themselves as Jews after 1989). Second, Müller shows a communist ideology appropriated through people, networks, and friendships—in contrast to the insights proposed by Igal Halfin, Jochen Hellbeck, or Kopeček about acquiring and maintaining communism through reading and writing.4 Third, Lechtman is powerfully ordinary in ghastly, extraordinary circumstances. In systematically discussing the grittiness of the quotidian, in camps, in poverty, in prison, or in Tel Aviv, Müller gently pushes against the established framework of the Famous People Living History. It is a welcome and feminist intervention, and brings to mind Lebow's depiction of budding socialists constructing Nowa Huta who used pages of How the Steel Was Tempered for hair curlers. Lebow and Müller are preparing an edition of Halina Krahelska's The Warsaw Chronicle, so there is more to look forward to.Lechtman lived in networks of help and friendships, and Müller's book is a beautiful testament to collegiality and mutual aid. Müller weaves into Lechtman's story her own account of her research, the conversations and support she experienced. Many, if not most, historians would delegate these to footnotes, if at all, in order to spotlight their findings. Müller is generous in taking the time to show how she worked with people around the world and gives thanks to them, colleagues she knew, research assistants she paid, but also archivists in Switzerland and France who sent scans during the pandemic. This perspective reminds us that scholarship can be a form of kinship and good feminist practice, embodied by its author.