Reading this book, I could not help but think of Heda Kovaly, the Czech Jew who survived World War II only to have her new family torn apart when her husband, a devout Communist, was arrested and executed as a defendant in the infamous Slánský Trial of 1952. “Three forces carved the landscape of my life,” she writes at the start of her memoir, “Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible.”Footnote 1 Kovaly identifies the first two forces as Adolph Hitler and Iosif Stalin; the third was a tiny bird hidden inside her. Tonia Lechtman, the subject of An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996, might have uttered something similar. A member of Kovaly's generation, her life was dominated by the same brutal historical forces epitomized by these two dictators. Unlike Kovaly, Lechtman, a Polish Jew, managed to remain outside the grasp of the Nazis—she survived World War II in Western Europe. While Kovaly regarded the communists with suspicion even before they destroyed her spouse, Lechtman and her husband were both communists; he, however, was killed at Auschwitz, while she was later imprisoned by her own comrades.
Anna Müller provides a comprehensive, doggedly researched account of the life of Tonia Lechtman (referred to throughout as Tonia). Her framing resonates with Kovaly's depiction of her own life, though Müller poses a dichotomy between an “ordinary” and “extraordinary” life. Müller sees Lechtman as ordinary both because she existed on the margins of the societies in which she lived, and her life was shaped by historical forces and events that violently transformed the world around her. Lechtman's biography, like Kovaly's, is truly a twentieth century European tale. But all such stories are different, “extraordinary,” Müller reminds us, due to the unique personalities and behaviors of individuals. In this telling, the “tiny bird” that kept Lechtman alive sprang from her identity, her varying affinity with and understanding of Polishness, Jewishness, communism, and motherhood.
Born in Łódź, Poland, Lechtman was seventeen when her family left for Palestine in 1935. After only two years, she was expelled from the Mandate, along with her new husband, due to illegal communist activity. They chose to settle in Paris, from where her husband left to join other left-wing idealists to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, Lechtman herself had a difficult time, giving birth to two children, supported by money from her parents and assistance from a network of foreign communists. After the start of WWII and the fall of France, she faced increasing threats from the authorities because of her Jewishness—an identity that seems to have meant the least to her. Her husband faced direct peril from the Nazis. Interned in France after fighting in Spain, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he died in January 1945.
To avoid her own internment, Lechtman fled to Switzerland. There, in 1944, she received training in relief work, which resulted in a job with the Unitarian Service Committee and close ties with its leader, Noel Field. Initially this position brought her expanded opportunities and meaningful work, sending her back to Poland in 1946. But in 1949 she was arrested by Polish authorities, most likely because of her connection to Field, who was placed at the center of a fabricated espionage network used by East European Stalinists to implicate “enemies.” Lechtman spent over five years in prison, which devastated her health and her family, but did not destroy her faith in the Party. Only the wave of antisemitism unleashed by the Polish state in 1968 did that. Müller poignantly explains why that betrayal felt worse than the 1949 arrest: “The year 1968, however, singled her out not for what she did but for who she was . . . a Pole of Jewish origin. That attack came from those she believed were called to protect people like herself and her children against the threats of fascism” (266). She subsequently left Poland and she spent the rest of her life in Israel, until her death in 1996.
The book is as much about the author's journey to uncover Lechtman's story as about that story itself. It is a very self-conscious rendering of the lives of Lechtman and her family, with frequent discussions of the sources—their content, context, and physicality. Müller regularly puts herself into the narrative, sharing her motivations, research process, and reflections. Some of this material is quite moving (particularly regarding interviews with Lechtman's children); other offers important considerations about the reliability of various documents or interpretations. Some, though, would be better placed in footnotes. Do we really need to be told, in the text, which of Müller's research assistants found certain information (62, 144), the archives in which she hoped but failed to find documents (55, 77), or with which historians she consulted (93, 115)? The expansive discussion of sources, ruminations on possible interpretations, and speculations to fill in gaps make for an uneven pace and flow of the narrative.
Müller draws on an impressive array of sources to present the story of this fascinating woman, doing it with tremendous empathy. Equally important, I think, is her sensitive and insightful exploration of the impact of Lechtman's communism and mothering on her children. These are all essential twentieth-century tales.
