REEEC Noontime Scholars Lecture.
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. She returned to post-war Poland with the Unitarian Service Committee on a mission to rebuild it. 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.
