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In May and June 1940, when the war seemed to be going badly for
Britain, thousands of German and Austrian refugees from Nazi
oppression were rounded up and put into internment camps on the
Isle of Man and elsewhere. Fred Uhlman, a Jewish refugee from
Stuttgart, a lawyer and an artist, was one of them. Uhlman, who was
deeply affected by the experience, set out to record it in word and
image. This volume reproduces his original internment diary from
1940 alongside another version of the same text from 1979, compiled
retrospectively. These texts are complemented by sixteen haunting
drawings and linocuts that Uhlman produced during internment. The
volume also contains the letters, highly moving personal documents,
exchanged to and from the internment camp between Uhlman and his
wife Diana; correspondence between Uhlman and his disapproving
aristocratic father-in-law Lord Croft; and documents from the daily
life of Hutchinson Camp, Douglas, Isle of Man, where Uhlman was
held for seven months. Chapters on Uhlman's biography and on his
artistic and literary output set his writings and drawings within
the wider context of his life and work. In addition, a chapter
outlining the internment crisis of 1940 also sets out to recreate
the extraordinary cultural and intellectual life that the internees
managed to make for themselves in Hutchinson Camp, in particular
the activities of the sizeable group of artists, such as Kurt
Schwitters, who happened to find themselves there.
One woman's national, political, ethnic, social, and personal
identities impart an extraordinary perspective on the histories of
Europe, Polish Jews, Communism, activism, and survival during the
twentieth century. Tonia Lechtman was a Jew, a loving mother and
wife, a Polish patriot, a committed Communist, and a Holocaust
survivor. Throughout her life these identities brought her to
multiple countries--Poland, Palestine, Spain, France, Germany,
Switzerland, and Israel--during some of the most pivotal and
cataclysmic decades of the twentieth century. In most of those
places, she lived on the margins of society while working to
promote Communism and trying to create a safe space for her small
children. Born in Lodz in 1918, Lechtman became fascinated with
Communism in her early youth. In 1935, to avoid the consequences of
her political activism during an increasingly anti-Semitic and
hostile political environment, the family moved to Palestine, where
Tonia met her future husband, Sioma. In 1937, the couple traveled
to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War. After discovering
she was pregnant, Lechtman relocated to France while Sioma joined
the International Brigades. She spent the Second World War in
Europe, traveling with two small children between France, Germany,
and Switzerland, at times only miraculously avoiding arrest and
being transported east to Nazi camps. After the war, she returned
to Poland, where she planned to (re)build Communist Poland.
However, soon after her arrival she was imprisoned for six years.
In 1971, under pressure from her children, Lechtman emigrated from
Poland to Israel, where she died in 1996. In writing Lechtman's
biography, Anna Muller has consulted a rich collection of primary
source material, including archival documentation, private
documents and photographs, interviews from different periods of
Lechtman's life, and personal correspondence. Despite this
intimacy, Muller also acknowledges key historiographical questions
arising from the lacunae of lost materials, the selective
preservation of others, and her own interpretive work translating a
life into a life story.
Drawing on autobiographical writings, oral histories, interrogation
protocols, and cell spy reports, If the Walls Could Speak focuses
on the lives of women in prison in postwar communist Poland. Some
were jailed for their alleged collaboration with the Nazis during
the war, some for postwar activities in various civil as well as
quasi-military groups, still others for allegedly dubious
activities on the basis of their relationships with those already
imprisoned. In some cases, there was some evidence of their
anti-state activities; in many others, the accusations were absurd
and based on cumbersome definitions of "anti-state." Anna Muller
shows how these women struggled to resist identifying themselves as
"prisoners" and regain their voices through a dialogue between the
"self," a hostile prison world, and the world outside, which, as
time passed, became increasingly menacing. The prison system in
postwar Poland functioned as a tool to subjugate society and
silence or destroy enemies-anti-communists, but also committed
communists. Arrests, trials, and prison sentences directly and
indirectly affected tens of thousands of people. Imprisonment
stigmatized both prisoners and their families, inspiring fear and
insecurity. Out of fear, worry for their loved ones, or a need to
act, women prisoners took on different roles and personalities to
protect themselves and create a semblance of normality, despite
abuses and prison confinement. They used words to (re)create
themselves during an interrogation; they used their senses to
orient themselves in the spatial organization of the prison and to
create a feeling of security; they used their physicality as a
confirmation of their gender identity and a means of exerting
pressure on the authorities; and they attempted to build a communal
cultural, social, religious, and educational life by drawing on
patterns they had acquired in their lives outside of prison.
Following the trajectory of women's life stories-from the moment of
interrogation, through the attempt to create themselves in a cell,
to the post-prison reordering of their old lives-this book reveals
how the prison cell in postwar Poland became a laboratory of human
heterogeneity, of reconstruction, and reinvention of the self, and
how life in a Stalinist prison adds to our understanding of
coercion and resistance under totalitarian regimes.
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