Life in Transit

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.

“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.”