Better Than Starbucks!

Miklós Radnóti [1909-1944], a Hungarian Jew and fierce anti-fascist, was perhaps the greatest of the Holocaust poets. Before Radnóti was murdered by the Nazis, he was known for his eclogues, romantic poems and translations. Born in Budapest in 1909, he published his first collection of poems, Pogány köszönto (“Pagan Salute”) in 1930 at age 21. His next book, Újmódi pásztorok éneke (“Modern Shepherd's Song”) was confiscated on grounds of “indecency,” earning him a light jail sentence. In 1931 he spent two months in Paris, where he visited the “Exposition colonial” and began translating African poems and folk tales into Hungarian. In 1934 he obtained his Ph.D. in Hungarian literature. The following year he married Fanni (Fifi) Gyarmati and they settled in Budapest. His book Járkálj csa, halálraítélt! (“Walk On, Condemned!”) won the prestigious Baumgarten Prize in 1937. Also in 1937 he wrote his Cartes Postales (“Postcards from France”); these poetic “snapshots” were precursors to his darker images of war, Razglednicas (“Picture Postcards”). During World War II, Radnóti published translations of Virgil, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Eluard, Apollinare and Blaise Cendras in Orpheus nyomában (“In the Footsteps of Orpheus”). Conscripted into the Hungarian army, he was forced to serve on forced labor battalions, at times arming and disarming explosives on the Ukrainian front. In 1944 he was deported to a compulsory labor camp near Bor, Yugoslavia. As the Nazis retreated from the approaching Russian army, the Bor concentration camp was evacuated and its internees were led on a forced march through Yugoslavia and Hungary. During what became his death march, Radnóti recorded images of what he saw and experienced. After writing his fourth and final “Postcard,” Radnóti was badly beaten by a soldier annoyed by his scribblings. Soon thereafter, the weakened poet was shot to death, murdered on November 9, 1944, along with 21 other prisoners who were unable to walk.  Their mass grave was exhumed after the war and Radnóti’s poems were found on his body by his wife, inscribed in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book. Radnóti’s posthumous collection, Tajtékos ég (“Clouded Sky” or “Foaming Sky”) contains odes to his wife, letters, poetic fragments and his final Postcards. Unlike his murderers, Miklós Radnóti never lost his humanity, and his empathy continues to live on through his work.

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               Michael R. Burch