Towards the end of World War II she was beheaded by the Nazis for high treason. Elisabeth von Thadden was seen as part of the resistance to Hitler’s regime, assumed to be connected to those trying to overthrow Hitler. She certainly was a critical thinker, a liberal, a devout protestant who had social contact to some of those involved in the July 20th assassination attempt. She helped where she could, but never considered herself political, just an upright, ethical citizen, a humanitarian. I spent several truly unhappy years in the park where her ashes were laid to rest.

Von Thadden had founded a boarding school for girls in the 1920s which was shut down later by the Nazis for activities endangering the State – there were no Hitler portraits hung in the halls of Wieblingen castle but there were Jewish students. The school reopened after the war under her name, and I was shipped there at age 13. I had no clue about the founder, I just hated an environment which at this time was less about giving girls an education, but rather a prep school for the daughters of the rich, the aristocracy, the divorced, and a few of us  belonging to none of these categories, ultimate outsiders, like myself. Internat is the German word for boarding school and interned I felt.

Lonely years. Years of ruining my stockings and scraping my knees or worse, climbing over glass shard-covered walls surrounding the castle to escape the sense of suffocation (I have the scars to prove it.) Years spent writing “why escape is not a good idea” or other inane essays as punishment when the governesses caught me, as they so often did. But the original founder had a heart for children, a soul to provide shelter for them and protection, a brain to educate girls, so all good. Had she lived, she would have been the first to take in orphans after the war ended.

Read here about her nephew writing an opera about her https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/nov/21/opera-for-my-resistance-fighter-aunt

 

If Someone Comes

 

If someone comes

from afar

with a language

whose sounds are possibly

silenced

by the whinnying of a mare

or

the chirping of

young blackbirds

or

like a shrieking saw

cutting apart any closeness –

 

If someone comes

from afar

with movements of a dog

or

perhaps of a rat

and it is winter

then give him warm clothes

it could also be

that his soles are on fire

(perhaps he straddled

         a meteor)

so do not scold him

for burning holes into your suffering carpet –

 

A foreigner’s arm always

holds his own country

like an orphan

for whom he possibly seeks

but a grave.

 

Nelly Sachs 

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1966/sachs-bio.html