Sachs, Nelly

The poet and playwright Leonie (Nelly) Sachs grew up in a Jewish family in Berlin. Her father was a wealthy manufacturer who died in 1930. After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Sachs lived under the Nazi regime until she, at the age of fifty, together with her mother Margarete was able to travel to Sweden in 1940, much on account of the efforts of the Swedish author and Nobel Prize laureate Selma Lagerlöf whom Sachs admired. Sachs had previously sent Lagerlöf her first book, a collection of fairy-tales entitled Legenden und Erzählungen (1921). The two authors never met, however. Lagerlöf died a few months before Sachs arrived in Sweden.