Life in Transit

Life in Transit is the long-awaited sequel to Shimon Redlich’s widely acclaimed Together and Apart in Brzezany, in which he discussed his childhood during the War and the Holocaust. Life in Transit tells the story of his adolescence in the city of Lodz in postwar Poland. Redlich’s personal memories are placed within the wider historical context of Jewish life in Poland and in Lodz during the immediate postwar years. Lodz in the years 1945-1950 was the second-largest city in the country and the major urban center of the Jewish population. Redlich’s research based on conventional sources and numerous interviews indicates that although the survivors still lived in the shadow of the Holocaust, postwar Jewish Lodz was permeated with a sense of vitality and hope.

Shimon Redlich (Ph.D. New York University) was born in Lwow, Poland in 1935 and lived in the nearby town of Brzezany where most of his family was annihilated during the Holocaust. He and his mother survived with the help of a Polish family and a Ukrainian peasant woman. The author lived in the city of Lodz in the years 1945-1950 and emigrated to Israel in early 1950. He served as Professor of Modern History at Ben-Gurion University until his retirement in 2003. Redlich published books and articles on the History of the Jews in the Soviet Union and on Ukrainian-Jewish relations. He is author of War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR and Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, 1919-1945.

Gabriel N. Finder, University of Virginia:
Life in Transit is populated by living, breathing people—rendered unfiltered by Redlich—who, in the shadow of the Holocaust, evinced a tremendous will to live. . . . [T]he distinctive contribution of Life in Transit is its emphasis, as shown through the lens of the remarkable Lodz Jewish community, on the vitality of the remaining remnant. Far from being dispirited, demoralized, or helpless, these Jews were protagonists both in their own survival during the Holocaust and in the rebirth of Jewry in its aftermath. In portraying this community—and, in so doing, revising the predominant historiographical reconstruction of postwar Polish Jewry—Redlich has produced a wondrous book.

Joanna Beata Michlic, Brandeis University:
"Life in Transit is an engaging and well-rounded narrative of interest to anyone who studies modern east European and east European Jewish social history, the Holocaust and its impact, and urban studies. By employing interviews and other personal accounts, Redlich is able to explore successfully the multiple dynamics and evolution of Jewish identity and values after the Holocaust. He pays constant attention to the differences in the prewar and wartime lived experiences and values of the Jews who lived in the city in the early postwar period, offering insight into the diverse and sometimes contradictory perceptions of what the city and life in it meant to them."

Omer Bartov, Brown University, and author of Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine:
“This book is both a moving personal account of childhood in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and a highly valuable account of Jewish life in Lodz in the early postwar years. Chronologically following in the footsteps of Redlich's extraordinary study of the town of Brzezany in Eastern Galicia during the German occupation, Life in Transit is filled with important insights into the identity of Jewish survivors, their varying wartime experiences and stories of survival, and, not least, the education of a new generation of child survivors, who in large part went on to build new lives for themselves across the globe. This book is certain to become essential reading for all those interested in life after genocide.”

Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis University:
“This remarkable combination of memoir and history is a continuation of the prize-winning book Together and Apart in Brezany: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (Bloomington, 2002), which described the author’s experiences as a boy before and during the Second World War. Life in Transit depicts his emigration with his family after the war to the largely undamaged town of Lódz, then the principal concentration of Jews in Poland. It provides a moving picture both of this community’s attempt to rebuild the shattered world of Polish Jewry and of the author’s own experiences as he came gradually to see that he has no future in Poland and thus decides to emigrate to Israel.”

Martin Gilbert, author of The Holocaust, The Jewish Tragedy:
"Focusing on the city of Lodz, but with a far wider span, this is one of the most impressive books on the Holocaust and its aftermath that I have read."