Nobel Foundation · Public domain

Nelly Sachs spent the years after the rise of the Nazis writing poetry and drama that spoke for the grief of the Jews who hadn't escaped Europe — her play Eli: A Mystery Play of Israel's Suffering and poetry collections including In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Habitations of Death) made the Holocaust the central subject of her work. In 1966 she shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with fellow laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon, one of the few writers honored for work written directly in response to the genocide.