Celan, Paul

The Romanian Jewish poet who wrote under the pen name Paul Celan was born as Paul Antschel. He grew up in Chernivtsi, Bukowina, a German-speaking region formerly in Romania and now part of Ukraine. After leaving school in 1938 he studied medicine in France; Romanian and Austrian universities did not accept Jewish students at the time. The war broke out while he was spending his first holiday at home in Romania, and he was unable to continue at university. The parents were deported to a Nazi concentration camp where Paul’s mother was soon executed as unfit for hard labour and his father died of typhus. Paul was sent to a forced labour camp in 1942 and was released eighteen months later.