Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (1924–1942)

Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was born to a Jewish family in Czernowitz, the former capital of Bukovina (later Romania, present-day Ukraine). She began to study literature and write poetry at an early age. She met Leiser Fichman in the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa’ir movement and a romance blossomed between them. At the beginning of the Nazi occupation, Fichman was taken to a forced-labor camp.

In July 1942, after having been interned in the ghetto, Selma and her family were deported to Transnistria. After an exhausting march, they were sent to the Michailowka labor camp, where the Germans and Ukrainians starved and terrorized the prisoners. Selma died there of typhus in December 1942, at age 18, and her parents died a short time later. Selma left behind 57 poems, written in pencil and hand-bound into a volume named Blütenlese (The Reaping of Blossoms). Fifty-two of the poems were her own and the others were translations from French, Yiddish, and Romanian writers. Leiser Fichman kept the book with him until 1944, when he sent it to a friend of Selma’s in Czernowitz. Later that year, he boarded the refugee ship Mefkure trying to reach the British Mandate of Palestine, but died when the vessel was torpedoed and sunk in the Black Sea. Selma's poems were rediscovered and published by Tel Aviv University in 1979. In 1980, they were published in Germany, through the efforts of journalist and researcher Jürgen Serke. The lost volume was published in its entirety under the title Ich bin in Sehnsucht eingehüllt (I Am Engulfed in Longing). An audiobook of the poems was produced in 2005.