Black Flakes

A major twentieth-century poet and translator, Paul Celan (born Antschel; Celan is an anagram of his original name) was born in the multicultural city of Czernowitz, Bukovina, the son of German-speaking Jews. He studied medicine in Paris in 1938, and returned to Romania before the outbreak of World War II. His parents died in Nazi labor camps and Celan was interned for eighteen months. After the war, establishing himself as a poet, he lived in Bucharest. He moved to Paris in 1948 to study German philology and literature and in 1960 earned the Büchner Prize from the German Academy of Language and Literature. Celan took his own life, as did a number of other notable survivors of the Holocaust.