Who Was Nelly Sachs? Google Doodle Celebrates Poet, Playwright Who Escaped Nazi Germany

Monday’s Google Doodle, a black and white illustration of a typewriter amidst 20th-century European imagery, was a celebration of Jewish poet and playwright Nelly Sachs. Artist Daniel Stolle drew the Doodle, which commemorated what would have been the 127th birthday of the Nobel Prize winner.

Sachs was born in Berlin in 1891 and escaped Nazi Germany near the beginning of World War II, in 1940. She and her mother left Germany for Sweden not long before she was due to report to a concentration camp.

She was a published poet before the move, one who had correspondence with Selma Lagerlöf. The famed Swedish author was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and personally lobbied for Sachs’ emigration to Sweden to the Swedish royal family. Lagerlöf then died in March 1940.

Sachs found work as a translator in Sweden, supporting both her mother and herself. She used the terror of Nazi Germany as inspiration for her work, which won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.

Sachs is perhaps best known for her 1950 play "Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels."

She died from intestinal cancer in Stockholm in 1970.