In total, four million copies of the book were sold in the United States, and it was translated into 13 different languages. A fictional account of her wartime experiences, it 'quickly became the first paperback original bestseller,' selling over two million copies in its first five years. In 1950 Torrès published the book Women's Barracks in the United States. He urged her to publish the diary she wrote while serving in the Free French Forces. In 1948 Torrès married Meyer Levin in Paris.

Her diary about her experiences on this journey from Poland's destroyed cities through the displaced persons camps in Western Europe to Israel and her imprisonment there by British forces has so far only been published in German, under the title Unerschrocken ( Unafraid). In 1947 Torrès accompanied American novelist Meyer Levin while he filmed the documentary Lo Tafhidunu ( The Illegals) about Jewish refugees who fled Poland after the Holocaust and tried to reach Palestine.

In October 1944 when she was five months pregnant, her first husband 20-year-old Georges Torrès-stepson of prewar French-Jewish Prime Minister Léon Blum-died while fighting with the 2nd Free French Armoured Division in Lorraine. Īt the age of 19, Torrès enlisted in the Corps des Volontaires françaises of Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces, and worked as a secretary in de Gaulle's London headquarters. It is possible the efforts and intervention of Samuel Schwarz, who resided in Portugal, helped secure the transit visas. Her family was able to escape because they received visas signed by Portuguese vice-consul Manuel Vieira Braga (following instructions from Aristides de Sousa Mendes) in Bayonne, France, in June 1940. Torrès fled her native country in 1940 via Lisbon to England when France surrendered to Nazi Germany after the Battle of France while her father-serving in the Polish Armed Forces in the West-was evacuated from La Rochelle by the British Home Fleet. Her paternal uncle Samuel Schwarz was a noted historian of the Jewish diaspora and crypto-Judaism.

Torrès was born Tereska Szwarc to the Jewish Polish sculptor Marek Szwarc and his wife Guina Pinkus in Paris. Tereska Torrès (born Tereska Szwarc 3 September 1920 – 20 September 2012) was a French writer known for the 1950 book Women's Barracks, the first 'original paperback bestseller.' In 2008 historians credited the republished book as the first pulp fiction book published in America to candidly address lesbian relationships, although Torrès did not agree with this analysis.

Women's Barracks by Tereska Torrès