Birth of Nelly Sachs

Nelly Sachs was born on 10 December 1891 in Schöneberg. A German-Swedish poet and playwright of Jewish descent, Sachs was born in Berlin and escaped Nazi persecution in 1940 with the help of the writer Selma Lagerlof, who secured her passage with her mother to Sweden. Her poetry, collected in works such as In the Habitations of Death and Flight and Metamorphosis, expressed the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, and her play Eli was a mystery play on the same theme. She struggled with mental illness after the war. She shared the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966 with Shmuel Yosef Agnon.

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