Tereska Torrès (1920–2012)

Tereska Torrès, née Szwarc, was born to a Jewish family in Paris. Her parents were Polish-born painter and sculptor Marek Szwarc and his wife Eugenia (Guina Pinkus), a novelist and poet. They converted to the Roman Catholic faith and sent her to a convent school for her education. In 1940, Tereska and her mother fled Germany's invasion and occupation of France in World War II via Lisbon to London. They were able to escape with transit visas signed by Portuguese vice-consul Manuel Vieira Braga, following instructions from Aristides de Sousa Mendes, at the consulate in Bayonne. Her father fought the Germans with the Polish army in exile. Tereska, age 19, enlisted in the Free French Forces, and worked as a secretary in the headquarters office in London, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant. In 1944, she fell in love with and married Georges Torrès, also serving with the Free French, the stepson of former French Prime Minister Léon Blum. In October of that year, when she was five months pregnant, Georges Torrès was killed fighting in France. Their daughter Dominique Torrès was born in early 1945. At the end of the war, Tereska returned to France; despondent over the loss of her husband, she attempted suicide. In 1947, she accompanied American novelist Meyer Levin and served as a producer while he filmed the documentary Lo Tafhidunu (The Illegals) about Jewish refugees who fled Poland after the Holocaust and tried to reach Palestine. The couple married in Paris in 1948 and had two sons who also became writers. She was keeping a diary of her experiences, which Levin urged her to turn into a novel. In 1950, it was published in the USA as Women’s Barracks, and caused a sensation for its depiction of the liaisons of women with male Resistance members and with one another. It sold four million copies in the USA and was translated into 13 different languages. Tereska wrote a dozen more novels in English, as well as several in French. She did not allow Women's Barracks to be published in France in her lifetime. Her diary of the war years was published in France in 2000 as Une Française Libre: Journal 1939-1945. Mission Secrète, a memoir about her efforts to help Ethiopian Jews emigrate to Israel, was published in 2012.