Nelly Sachs: who was she and why is she today's Google Doodle?

Google is today celebrating the 127th birthday of Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Nelly Sachs with a special commemorative Doodle.

Sachs was born into a Jewish family in Berlin on December 10, 1891 but fled the horrors of the Nazi regime to Sweden with her mother in 1940.

She became known for her poetry documenting the Holocaust and the suffering of Jews in Nazi Germany, and she was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Here's why Nelly Sachs deserves to be celebrated...

Who was Nelly Sachs?

Leonie "Nelly" Sachs was born 127 years ago today to a wealthy family in Tiergarten, Berlin.

A talented dancer, she was home-schooled because of concerns over her health and grew up introverted and sheltered.

She started to write as a teenager and began a pen pal friendship with Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlof, who later helped her escape to Sweden as the Nazis took power in Germany.

Nelly fled Germany with her mother Margarete in 1940 after their apartment was ripped apart by the Gestapo, a week before they were scheduled to report to a concentration camp.

She was so terrified of the Nazis and the impending tyranny that at one point she lost the ability to speak.

Nelly and Margarete settled in Sweden as refugees in a small flat, and the younger Sachs supported them by working as a translator.

It was during this time that she started to write powerful poems and plays that expressed the horrors of the Holocaust.

Nelly, who never married, spent the remainder of her time caring for Margarete before her mother's death in 1950.

Nelly was granted Swedish citizenship in 1952 but suffered a number of nervous breakdowns after her mother's death and would spend time in a mental institution, tormented by hallucinations of Nazi persecution.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literatures in 1966 after publishing a number of poetry collections.

She died in Stockholm on May 12, 1970 aged 78, after battling intestinal cancer.

Nelly Sachs' famous poems, plays and poetry collections

Nelly Sachs' most famous poem is called O Die Schornsteine, which translates to O the Chimneys. It addresses the concentration camps where many of her Jewish relatives were killed.

Most of her works, such as her poetry collections In Death's House, published in 1947, and Darkening of the Stars in 1949, expressed the grief of the Jewish people during the Holocaust

Through her work Sachs became an unofficial spokesperson for the pain of the Jewish people.

Her most well-known play, Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel, published in 1951, expanded on these ideas of grief and suffering.