Carol Margulies and relatives

The picture was taken in the courtyard of our house in Czernowitz in the 1930s. Below, the first one from the left in the second row, it's me. My brother, Hary Margulies, is the one next to me, in front. To the right is Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, our cousin related to us through my great-grandfather, Abraham Schrager. In the back row, in the middle, is a little girl whose name was Erica, held in the arms of her uncle; his name was Schrager and he had come from America. I was hardly related to them. They must have been third or fourth cousins from my mother's side of the family. Her grandmother was a sister of our Schrager grandmother. When this picture was taken, I was approximately ten.

Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger lived in my uncle's house too. Eisinger was her father's name and Meerbaum was the name of her mother's second husband. She was my cousin too; we were related through my great-grandfather, Abraham Schrager. Selma and her parents weren't deported with us. They stayed home for an extra year. But they were eventually taken with the second wave, in 1942. They got to the Mihailovca camp, across the River Bug. Selma caught typhus and died on 16th December 1942, at the age of 18. After her death they discovered she had kept a diary, like Anna Frank. My cousin, Silvia, who lives in Israel, sent me an article published in an Israeli newspaper, pointing out that the publishing of the diary was 'due to Teacher Hersch Segal, who discovered her'. 

It's an article in German which claims that Selma was related to Paul Celan. The article renders a fragment of Selma's diary, written in German, 'Spring. The trees are only now naked, and every bush is a sweet whisper, like the first announcement of the new joy, and swallows will return tomorrow too'.