Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943)

Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner was born into an assimilated middle-class German-Jewish family, the daughter of a lawyer. She grew up in Berlin's Charlottenburg quarter and was educated in private schools. While working as a kindergarten teacher, she learned Russian and completed a course for language teachers in Berlin, graduating with a diploma in English and French. During the last two years of World War I, she worked as an interpreter and censor of soldiers' correspondence. In 1917, she published her first book, simply titled "Poems," under the pseudonym Gertrud Kolmar (Kolmar being the German name for the town of Chodzież in Prussia from which her family came). After the war, she worked as a governess for several families in Berlin, and briefly as a teacher of the disabled in Hamburg. In 1927, she took a study trip to France, staying in Paris and Dijon, where she trained to be an interpreter. The following year, she returned to her family home, after her mother's health deteriorated, to help look after the household. On her mother's death in March 1930, she began working as her father's secretary. In the late 1920s, Gertrud Kolmar's poems began to appear in various literary journals and anthologies. Due to the Nazi persecution of Jews, the family had to sell its house in the Berlin suburb of Finkenkrug and move into an apartment. In July 1941, Gertrud Kolmar was ordered to work in a forced labor group in the German armaments industry. She was transported in 1943 to Auschwitz concentration camp, where it's believed she was killed in the gas chamber shortly after her arrival.