A legacy written in love

When Daniela Torsh welcomed her first child into the world, she felt an overwhelming urge to share the news with someone who could never hear it – her father, Paul Torsh (born Pavel Thorsch), who had died when she was just eleven years old. That profound moment of loss and longing became the catalyst for her deeply personal memoir, Crying in the Archives.

“I realised that my grandkids would possibly like to read about my life and family when they are older. So I wrote it for them,” Torsh explains.

With six grandchildren aged between eight and fifteen, her motivation was clear: to create a bridge between generations, ensuring the stories of survival and resilience wouldn’t be lost to time.

The book delves into the extraordinary love story of her parents, Holocaust survivors who found each other in the darkest of circumstances. Her mother Mimi endured four years in concentration camps, while her father Paul survived three months of imprisonment. They met in Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945, both married to other people at the time. “They fell in love and began their relationship in the shadow of death,” Torsh writes, capturing the complexity of love born from trauma.

Born in Prague in 1946, Torsh emigrated to Australia with her parents in 1948. Yet the family’s Jewish identity remained hidden – a secret that only emerged after her father’s death.