In May 1940, the poet Nelly Sachs fled to Sweden with her mother. Little is known about what she experienced in her home town of Berlin in the years after the Nazis came to power. She didn't talk about it in detail, or about her childhood and youth. She wrote about this in a letter to her long-term sponsor, the exile researcher Walter A. Berendsohn: "When I consider that, even if there are people who might be interested, my story can already be read in my collections of poems, it seems to me to be superfluous, except maybe for a few pieces of factual information, to interlace such exceptionally trivial things, and such unimportant things compared with a life so full of inner tragedy as reports about a daily life that was once led." (ed. trans.) 

The documents that Sachs compiled in 1952 in order to claim damages for the forced selling of her parents' house for a give-away price are therefore an important source, even if they contain very few details. The short "résumé" which describes extortion by the tenants and the threatening of her best friend does however provide an impression of how the repeated violent invasions of the sensitive and secluded artist's privacy must have unsettled her, bringing her to fall silent for several days. "My voice took flight to the fish", she write in the short piece of prose Leben unter Bedrohung (Life under threat) which was published in German in 1956.