Wrocław
Anna Maria Adamczyk
Zeitschrift des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten, Zeszyt 4 (2012), 2012, s. 438 - 452
In the footsteps of Nelly Sachs. Rosi Wosk's collection in the German Literature Archive in Marbach
Rosi Wosk, née Press, was a Hungarian Jew, a survivor of the Holocaust, who was transported in one of the white buses to Sweden after the liberation. She lived with her husband, Henry Wosk, a Polish Jew, and their son in Stockholm in an apartment next to Nelly Sachs, a German Jewish Nobel Prize winner poet from Berlin. Over time the two women became friends and Rosi Wosk became a kind of personal assistant and housekeeper. Nelly Sachs entrusted all her treasures from the past to Rosi Wosk. The treasures included her last will and testament, letters, postcards, photographs, manuscripts, a hand-made album, drawings of flowers, prewar newspaper cuttings with poems, notes from Sachs' stay in a psychiatric hospital, and small scraps of paper with shopping lists or things-to-do lists for the housekeeper, collected by Rosi Wosk.
The collection also contains four notebooks with Rosi Wosk's notes in Hungarian, German and Swedish in which she describes meetings and conversations with Nelly Sachs. On the one hand, the content of the three notebooks expresses Wosk's sympathy with Sachs' suffering, friendship, love and helpfulness, and on the other hand, fatigue, exhaustion and helplessness. It would be worth asking why and for whom Nelly Sachs' neighbour made notes in a language which she had only basic knowledge of.
Rosi Wosk's collection wasn't purchased from her son, Bertil Wosk, until 2007 by the German Literature Archive in Marbach.