Gertrud Kolmar

She attended a private girls' grammar school from 1901 to 1911, and then a women's agricultural and home economics college, Arvedshof, in Elbisbach, near Leipzig.

During the last two years of World War I she was also employed as an interpreter and censor of soldiers' correspondence in a prisoner-of-war camp in Döberitz, near Berlin.

The Chodziesner family, as a result of the intensification of the persecution of Jews under National Socialism, had to sell its house in the Berlin suburb of Finkenkrug, which, to Kolmar's imagination became her 'lost paradise' (das verlorene Paradies), and was constrained to take over a floor in an apartment block called 'Jewshome' (Judenhaus) in the Berlin suburb of Schöneberg.

Gertrud Kolmar was arrested in the course of a factory raid on 27 February 1943, and transported on 2 March to Auschwitz, though the date and circumstances of her murder are not known.

Her Jewish ancestors had been connected to the Greater Poland area for generations, with family members living in Rogoźno and Dobiegniew.

Jacob Picard, in his epilogue to Gertrud Kolmar: Das Lyrische Werk described her both as 'one of the most important woman poets' in the whole of German literature, and 'the greatest lyrical poetess of Jewish descent who has ever lived'.

Michael Hamburger withheld judgement on the latter affirmation on the grounds he was not sufficiently competent to judge, but agreed with Picard's high estimation of her as a master poet in the German lyrical canon.