From Page to Stage: Internee Number 6

Join us for a reading of Nurit Chinn’s (UK) new play in development, Internee Number 6. This program is part of Primo Levi Center’s collaboration with CUNY. Nurit Chinn is a an artist in residence at Bookhouse for the year 2025.

The program is free and open to the public. Reserve your ticket here.

Followed by a panel with Nurit Chinn, Eric Feingersh Steele, the author’s son, musician, and Natalia Indrimi, the Executive Director of the Primo Levi Center. Moderated by Frank Hentschker.

Internee Number 6 is a theatrical adaptation of a memoir by the same name, written by Maria Eisenstein and first published in 1944. The play, adapted by Nurit Chinn, explores the little-known experiences of Jewish women imprisoned in Fascist internment camps in Italy during the Holocaust. It follows Eisenstein and other women as they navigate daily life in the camp ran by Italian fascists—forming friendships, staging quiet acts of rebellion, and grappling with profound uncertainty as Hitler’s forces advance across Europe. The script draws almost entirely from Eisenstein’s original text, the earliest known memoir written from inside an Italian Fascist internment camp.

Little is known about Maria Moldauer’s life prior to her arrival in Florence in the early 1930s and after her departure from Italy in 1948. She was born in Vienna to Polish-Jewish parents in 1915, and moved to Italy to study literature at the University of Florence. After graduating, she moved to Catania, Sicily, with her lover, Franco. On June 10, 1940, when Mussolini ordered the arrest of all Jews who did not have or had been stripped of Italian citizenship, Moldauer was immediately incarcerated and later sent to the women’s concentration camp. She spent the following three years in various places of confinement.

During detention, she began to gather her notes into what would become her chronicle of the war years. The book was published in Rome in 1944, a few months after the arrival of the Allies, under the title Internee Number 6. For five decades after the publication, it was believed to be the diary of someone who had been deported and killed, or perhaps a fiction written under an assumed name. Only in 1994, Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, whose groundbreaking research enriched historiography with the little-known history of Mussolini’s concentration camps (Routledge in 2020), identified Maria and reconstructed her story.

Nurit Chinn is a playwright and producer from London, currently based in Brooklyn. Her plays have been developed or presented at Alliance Theatre, the Center for New Jewish Culture, Brooklyn Academy of Music, VAULT Festival, Dixon Place, and others. Her play Godbird will be produced at The Brick in January as part of Exponential Festival 2026. Nurit is a 2024/5 New Jewish Culture Fellow, winner of the 2025 Conchord Theatricals OOB festival, and an alum of the Royal Court Theatre’s Writers’ Group. Her plays have been finalists for the Princess Grace Award/Fellowship at New Dramatists, the Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship, and the Alliance/Kendeda Award. Nurit is currently under commission by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and Centro Primo Levi, where she is also the Playwright-In-Residence. She is also the Co-Director of the Exponential Festival, alongside Bailey Williams. BA: Yale University; MFA: Brooklyn College, Playwriting.

Eric Feingersh Steele was born, raised, and mostly schooled in Los Angeles California. He took an early interest in music and the written word in its many forms. Literature, poetry, music, and drama have been his tools for understanding his experiences, navigating a tumultuous youth, and traveling the world. He and his wife Diane married in 1983. They have three children: Cameron, Nathan, and Teagan, and a grandchild whose name is Griffin. Eric founded and ran three incarnations of a recording studio while being in the same “rock band” for 27 years. He writes and produces music in many forms, while living a somewhat sedate life in the Bay Area near San Francisco.

From The Forward on Maria Eisenstein’s Internee N. 6