Nurit Chinn's: Internee Number 6

Join us for a reading of Nurit Chinn’s (UK) new play in development, Internee Number 6. Directed by Dara Malina and with actors Zoë Geltman, Arielle Shiri, Constance Shulman, and Catherine Curtin. In collaboration with the Primo Levi Center New York. Followed by a panel with Chinn, Eric Feingersh Steele (Eisenstein's son), 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. It was largely written in the summer of 1940. 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 foreign Jewish 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.

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 Concord 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.

Maria Moldauer Eisenstein, was born in Vienna to Polish-Jewish parents in 1915, and moved to Italy to study literature at the University of Florence. Little is known about Einsenstein's life prior to her arrival in Florence in the early 1930s. 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, Eisenstein 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. Also little is known of Eisenstein after her departure from Italy in 1948.

Natalia Indrimi has been the director of Centro Primo Levi New York since 2007. Between 2000 and 2007, she was Director of Programs at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Programs she curated in this position include Hannah Arendt's, Elias Canetti’s, and Emmanuel Levinas' centennial conferences, the first New York tributes to Bruno Schulz and Clarice Lispector, and the series Editing America on the immigrant gaze as a form of cultural and political editing. Since 2005 she has coordinated research projects and a seminar series on fascism, totalitarianism, and the persecution of the Jews in Italy. She coordinated research projects on the Jews of colonial territories, including Fiume and Rhodes. She curated the exhibition on the Jews of Rhodes, Los Corassones Avlan. As director of Centro Primo Levi NY, she focuses her work on programs, research, and debate on the public display of history. 

Eric Feingersh Steele, Maria Eisenstein's only child, 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.

Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian chemist and writer born into a Jewish family in Turin in 1919. In 1938, when Mussolini’s Racial Laws deprived Italian Jews of civil rights, Levi was forced to work in a semi-clandestine condition. In 1944, he joined the resistance movement with a group of inexperienced friends. Arrested almost immediately by the Fascist police, he was deported to Auschwitz. He survived and returned to Italy at the end of 1945. His account of life, work, and death in the camp, If This Is a Man, translated into 45 languages, has become a fundamental reference for scholars of 20th-century totalitarianism, human nature, and power. He died in 1987. Levi worked for most of his life as a factory chemist. Writing was his “other trade”. His book The Periodic Table, which brings together his two worlds, was published in English in 1984 and gave him international acclaim through the endorsement of Saul Bellow and, later, Philip Roth. His experiences in the industrial setting of Turin, where he witnessed the intersection of science and labor, greatly influenced his writing and his perspective on the human condition. Through short stories, novels, memoirs, and an intense public activity on the radio and the press, Levi focused on the fragility of democratic societies, state violence, economic injustice, the nature of labor, the destruction of the planet, the beauty of science, and the perils of the unregulated pursuit of technological advancement. In his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi articulated the concept of “grey zone,” which had a far-reaching influence on contemporary political and ethical thought. Having witnessed the persistence of violence, warfare, and a culture of consumption, Levi re-examined the questions he had dealt with in forty years of writing: What are the structures of an authoritarian system? What are the tools to degrade and simplify conscience and knowledge? What is the relationship between the oppressors and the oppressed? What dynamics surround and enable it? Who is a monster? Is rebellion possible? Would all human beings, under certain conditions, exercise extreme violence against others?

Dara Malina is a director of theatre, opera, performance art, and video. Her personal practice interrogates abjection, gender, violence, discomfort and comedy. Most recently, she was Associate Director to Ian Rickson on Jen Silverman’s adaptation of Strindberg’s CREDITORS as part of TOGETHER, a theatrical collaboration between Sonia Friedman Productions and Hugh Jackman. Often working on new plays, she directed SAMUEL by Alexis Roblan (The Tank), COACH COACH by Bailey Williams (Clubbed Thumb Winterworks), HEAVENLY FOOLS by Amanda Horowitz (Rutgers) and THE ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE, a new opera by Eric Moe and Rob Handel (World Premiere, HERE). Dara has worked as a guest director and educator at Barnard, Rutgers, Ramapo, LIU-Post, Pace, Montclair State, and Alfred University. Currently, she is working with frequent collaborator, singer-songwriter Lacy Rose on her next music video for LISPECTOR--an album inspired by the life and works of Clarice Lispector. MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts. Member: Ensemble Studio Theatre, New Georges Affiliated Artist.