Selma Merbaum: Ich habe keine Zeit gehabt zuende zu schreiben by Marion Tauschwitz (review)

In 1947, a diary, “The Grave in the Cherry Orchard,” was published in London, England. This diary is the only testimony of the German concentration camp Michailovka in the Ukraine, near the rivers Dnjester and Bug. Whereas most of the people in this camp died of typhoid fever or were shot to death, the author of the diary, the painter Arnold Daghani, and his wife were fortunate enough to escape alive. The diary is an account of life in the camp with illustrations by the author. On page 80 the drawing shows the lowering of the corpse of a young girl from an upper bunk. The caption indicates the girl had died in the camp at the age of eighteen, in December 1942. The original of the drawing is on display at Yad Vashem, the Memorial Museum of the Holocaust in Jerusalem.

Who was this girl? Her name was Selma Merbaum-Eisinger. Marion Tauschwitz, a Heidelberg writer, docent, and author of Hilde Domin’s biography, took it upon herself to uncover more specific details about Selma’s background. First, Tauschwitz established that Selma’s last name was just Merbaum. Selma had written poems in German and translated poems from Yiddish, Romanian, and French into German. Initially, only one of her poems, entitled “Poem,” had been published in an East German anthology in 1968.

By the time she was seventeen, Selma had transcribed fifty-seven of her poems and collected them in an album with a cover decorated with dainty spring flowers. Selma called the volume “Blütenlese” (233–308) and dedicated it to Leiser Fischman. He entrusted Selma’s manuscript to a girlfriend of Selma’s before he perished on a ship that sank of the coast of Palestine. The manuscript finally reached Israel after World War II. Selma’s poems show an astonishing command of the German language, considering that her schooling had been mostly in Romanian. She demonstrates great sensitivity for flowers, trees, rain, wind, and clouds.

Tauschwitz lets Selma speak through her poems. Based on thorough research, involving travel to Czernowitz and conversations with contemporary witnesses, Tauschwitz provides background for the Merbaum family as well as the gray reality, World War II and the occupation of Czernowitz by German troops and the deportations to Transnistria. “Du willst mich töten. Weshalb?” (260): The only letter that she wrote from the concentration camp, three months before her death, closes with the following words: “Of course one endures. One endures despite the fact that time and again one thinks this is too much, I can’t go on, I shall collapse . . . kisses, Chasak” (Hebrew for “be strong”) (201).

In her foreword, the German actress Iris Berben mentions the many musical adaptations of Selma’s poems and eloquently states that Tauschwitz’s biography gives Selma back the biography that the Nazi villains tried to take away from her (11). Marion Tauschwitz deserves special credit for having reconstructed the life of the young poetess and re-edited the poems based on the originals.