Page 103 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. "Fragmenty pamięci".

Wielka Szpera 5-12 września 1942 The Great Szpera, 5-12 September 1942

Stella Szafir

The world is a huge, stinking puddle,
In which the bacteria are thousands
Over which hangs a cloud of big, heavy
Veiled bright, golden sun.
Among the bacteria hatred continues to grow,
A stronger body lives off weaker alive
Ah, when the sun shall shine stronger
to kill the bacterias and dry out the mud?!

Translated by Gaja Staroń
This poem was written in the ghetto by the teenage Stella (Stenia) Szafir, who was deported from the
ghetto in September 1942 during the Great Szpera, and murdered in Chełmno. She was a beautiful
girl of exotic features. She loved poetry and, as her friend Salomea Kape remarked in her short story
Stella, she saw hidden beauty everywhere and “an endless list of little wonders to which I [Salomea]
was blind”. Stella lived in the ghetto with her parents and younger brother at 10 Żydowska Street.
To forget the hunger and the tragedy of war, she escaped into a world of books, art and made-up
games. She was a beautiful presence in a cruel world. When the Germans picked her mother and
brother during the selection for deportation in September 1942, she did not know what to do. No one
helped her. The next day Stella handed herself over to the Gestapo herself.

“Nothing was left of Stella – none of her drawings, her diary, her poetry – only my memory,” wrote
Salomea Kape, a survivor of the war. She died in 2021 in New York, and to the end of her life she re-
gretted not stopping her friend at that moment. It was Salomea who remembered Stella’s poem. The
poem can be found on the wall of the building at 26 Franciszkańska Street.

We keep Stella Szafir in our thoughts.

103