Nelly Sachs (1891–1970)

Nelly Sachs was born to a Jewish family in Berlin-Schöneberg, Germany. Her parents were Margarethe (Karger) and Georg Wilhelm Sachs, a wealthy industrialist and inventor. She grew up in the fashionable Tiergarten area of Berlin and was educated at home, also attending the Hoch Toechterschule (girls' school). She began writing poetry at an early age. The rise of the Nazi regime to power in 1933 brought the family increasing persecution and fear. In 1940, a week before she was to be sent to forced labor, Nelly fled to Sweden with her mother, with the help of her friend Selma Lagerlöf. At age 50, her career as a published poet then began. She also translated German poetry into Swedish and Swedish poetry into German. Among her most famous works were "O die Schornsteine" ("O the Chimneys," a reference to the smoke from the Nazi death camps), which was selected as the title poem of a 1967 collection of her work in English translation; and the verse play Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel (1950), broadcast as a radio play. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, shared with the poet S.Y. (Shmuel Yosef) Agnon. The German town of Dortmund instituted and funded the Nelly Sachs Prize for Literature, of which she was the first recipient in 1961.