Tonia Lechtman (1918–1996) was a Jewish activist born in Łódź who bound her life to communism. After her communist involvement in interwar Poland, she continued her activism in Palestine before traveling to France and Switzerland, where she survived the war with two small children. She returned to post-war Poland with the Unitarian Service Committee on a mission to rebuild it from war ruins. Lechtman’s story provides a close look at the process of negotiating one’s identity, a process that is circumscribed in time and space and yet one that draws creatively from complex interactions between gender, individual intricacies and ideological commitments, in this case, communism.
Anna Müller holds an M.A. from the University of Gdańsk, Poland and a Ph.D. from Indiana University. She is an Associate Professor and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is the author of If the Walls Could Speak. Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press.
