Gertrud Kolmar was born in Berlin in 1894 as the eldest daughter of a Jewish lawyer. She learnt several languages and worked during the First World War as a translator, later as a teacher and governess. When her mother died, she took over the household and became her father's personal assistant. She published numerous poems in newspapers and anthologies but stayed away from the literary circles. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Gertrud Kolmar and her father were the only members of the family who decided to stay in Germany . In 1938 they were expropriated and sent to a "Jew House" in Berlin Schöneberg. In 1941 Gertrud Kolmar was recruited for slave labour in an arms factory and in 1943 she was murdered in Auschwitz.