SOURCE: "A Woman's View of the Holocaust: The Poetry of Nelly Sachs," in Rendezvous, Vol. XXI, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 47-50.

In the following essay, Cervantes discusses Sachs's role as the "voice of the silenced victims" of the Holocaust.

In her exhaustive study, Accounting for Genocide, Helen Fein takes note of the historical fact underlying her social history: Two thirds of European Jews alive in 1930—in the territories later to experience the dominance of Nazi terror—had been killed by 1945. And the majority of the victims were women and children. All of poet Nelly Sachs' published oeuvre is indelibly marked by the nightmarish experience of the Nazis' extermination policies and practices against Jewish people, what we have come to know as the Holocaust. Earlier in the twentieth century Jewish writers, such as Franz Kafka, had turned visionary nightmares into masterful prose. In the 1940's, when Sachs began writing about...