Nelly Sachs
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1966
“for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing,
which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength”
“but at dawn in the hills of pain
they see their fathers and mothers
dying again and again.”
[…]
“Always
there where children die
stone and star
and so many dreams
become homeless”
[…]
Nelly Sachs, Collected Poems Vol 1, 1944-1949, German English Bilingual version.
If words can actually make us bleed, then I’d bleed so badly reading the poem of Nelly Sachs. Portrayed the catastrophe and grief of her fellow Jews in the Holocaust, it’s very hard, painful and emotional especially the verses about mothers and children. Her perseverance to write during hospitalized in mental institute was really remarkable, shadowed the reflection of her poems.
Nelly Sachs was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1891. A week before she was scheduled to report to a concentration camp, she and her mother escaped to Sweden with the help of her friend, Selma Lagerlöf. As the Nazis took power, she became increasingly terrified, at one point losing the ability to speak. After the death of her mother she suffered several nervous breakdown, hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions of persecution by Nazis, she was hospitalised in mental institution and at the same time, kept writing until she recovered.
True grit.
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