When Nelly Sachs boarded a plane on the 12th of May 1940, leaving Berlin from Tempelhof Flughafen, she left a country that had been her home for almost 50 years.1 She was born in Berlin in December 1891 and had lived alone with her mother since 1930 when her father passed away. The latest escape was preceded by months of intense work by friends, and the two women were saved at the very last minute. A few days before Sachs received her long awaited transit visa to Sweden, she had also received her ”Stellungsbefehl” which ordered her to go an Arbeitslager. This grim euphemism meant certain death for her and her mother Margarete. The whole episode of Sachs’ escape is symptomatic of a general lack of understanding about what was going to take place in Germany. Of course it is easy for us today, with historical distance, to see the signs and perhaps it is wrong to assume that Sachs and her compatriots even could imagine that such a horror eventually was planed for them. But the episod