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A judgmental mother-in-law's dramatic WWII diary leads a writer to reevaluate their relationship, and in a race against her husband’s illness, piece together the Jewish family’s unusual history, including hidden children, detention, and a bold escape from a little-known French internment camp for women.
Liberated from a long-shut suitcase during the Covid lockdown, the German-language diary of Regina Felsen-Torn chronicles her incarceration in Rieucros, a French detention camp for women, where authorities of France’s Third Republic held Jewish immigrants and women suspected of loose morals, dangerous political leanings, or both. Charged with espionage and deprived of due process, Felsen-Torn had been arrested, her ten-month old baby left in the care of family. Felsen-Torn’s vivid eyewitness diary is a unique survivor account of a little-known camp that became part of Vichy France's complex of internment facilities in compliance with Nazi authorities. Uncovering Rieucros, the only camp exclusively for women out of nearly 200 in pre-war France, makes Regina’s account and her daughter-in-law’s framing narrative not only an important contribution to the historical record, but an enthralling read. The author's relationship with her mother-in-law is as particular as it is timeless, with an unexpected bond developing across time from the least likely circumstances.
Complemented by twelve documentary watercolors by Helene Maywald, a German artist interned at the camp.
Susan Reimer-Torn is an author and journalist who spent 22 years in France. She’s written about dance, feminism, France and its Jews, her own spiritual journey of rupture and tentative return to the Orthodox Judaism in which she was raised and educated. Her work has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, The Forward, Tikkun, the Jewish Week and Jewish Currents. She is the author of the memoir Maybe Not Such a Good Girl: Reflections on Rupture and Return and co-author of In Performance: Classics of the Dance. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.