Landscape of DeathThe Last Poems of Miklós Radnóti

by Lauren Tivey

“The world will be rebuilt again, let them ban my poems,

my voice will be heard at the foot of new walls.”

~ from “Not Even Memory, No Magic” (1944)

In 1946, just outside the town of Abda, Hungary, a mass grave was

exhumed. Fanny Radnóti, wife of the poet Miklós Radnóti, found something in the pocket of the trenchcoat her executed

husband still wore: a notebook full of poems he had written during his time in a Nazi labor camp and over the forced

march that constituted his final days. These poems, all written within days of one another in the fall of 1944, include

“Root”, and “Postcards.” His very last poem, “Postcards,” is a series of four short stanzas written just days before his

death. These are the words of a man writing under barbaric, inhumane conditions, and they comprise a tragic document of

the Holocaust. And yet, somehow, Radnóti’s words are breathtaking, luminous, pared-down to an exquisite precision;

even though recording the horror of the poet’s last days, they also convey hope, love for his wife, love for his country and

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for nature, and a haunting prophesy of his own death. In studying Radnóti’s work in the posthumous Clouded Sky (1972),

it is possible to trace the arc of his development from a young romantic into a mature and brilliant poet, albeit through the

brutal catalyst of the Holocaust.

To best understand Radnóti’s last poems, a brief look at his life is necessary, for not only is this a life with near-

mythological qualities, but his work and life are now historically and inextricably interwoven. As the Hungarian scholar

G. Ferencz has stated, Radnóti’s work “has irreversibly become one with his life and tragic death […] there is no divide

between life and work, they continue to exist in an interplay, mutually interpreting one another.” Indeed, Radnóti’s life

was remarkable, right from the moment of his birth. He was born in 1909 to a bourgeois Jewish family. Both his mother

and twin brother died during the birthing (Radnóti was not told of the circumstances of his birth until he was ten years old,

and he suffered with guilt over this for the rest of his life). His father passed away when he was twelve, and he was then

raised by relatives, who offered him an excellent education. His first collection of poems, Pagan Salute, was published in

1930, when he was just twenty-one years old. In 1931, his second collection, Song of Modern Shepherds, was confiscated

by authorities on grounds of indecency, and Radnóti drew a short jail sentence. He then spent time in Paris, translating

African poems and folktales into Hungarian, before returning to study Hungarian and French literature in Budapest. After

receiving his doctorate degree, he had a difficult time finding a teaching position due to the fact that he was Jewish, and

he supported himself by translating, tutoring, and freelance writing. He married his wife, Fanny, in 1935, and wrote many

love poems to her. His work, Walk On, Condemned, won the Baumgarten Prize in 1936. Radnóti translated widely from

classical Greek and Latin, as well as English and French, concentrating on such poets Virgil, Rimbaud, Mallarm é, and

Apollinaire. After being officially identified as a Jew in 1938, Radnóti was sent to a labor camp, the first of three forced

confinements. At one point, he worked on the Ukranian Front, arming and disarming explosives. Finally, in 1944, he was

taken to a work camp at a copper mine in Bor, just southeast of the Hungarian border in Serbia. In August of that year,

just as camps were being liberated, Radnóti’s group of over 3,000 prisoners was force-marched back into Hungary. Very

few made it back alive. According to witnesses, Radnóti was severely beaten by a drunken guard for what was perceived

as “scribbling” in his notebook. Too weak to continue, the poet was shot into the mass grave with twenty-one others near

Abda. He was 35 years old.

For certain, Radnóti was already on his way to becoming an accomplished and highly skilled poet before being

forced into the cruelest of conditions—and the more chaotic the times, the more refined his poems became. This is evident

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in the posthumous Clouded Sky (1972). This collection is sometimes translated as “Foamy Sky,” or “Foaming Sky,” and,

as with all translated work, other variations appear not only within the title, but within the poems themselves, sometimes

slight, sometimes wild. With that in mind, we will utilize the excellent text translation of Steven Polgar, Stephen Berg,

and S.J. Marks, for purposes of uniformity. In this version of Clouded Sky, “Postcards” and other last poems appear. To be

clear, the poems found in Radnóti’s trenchcoat pocket (often referred to by Radnóti scholars as “the Bor Notebook”)

consisted of poems written in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book—most had been damaged and were illegible after

eighteen months underground, and only a few were able to be salvaged: the four “Postcards” and “Root” were

miraculously preserved. All of the other later poems appearing in Clouded Sky had been carefully copied by Radnóti and

given to a fellow prisoner, Sándor Szalai, who survived the camps. These later poems (from the year 1944), include

“Letter to My Wife,” “Forced March,” and “Fragment,” among others, and we can also consider these as the “last poems”

of Miklós Radnóti. In comparing the earlier poems of Clouded Sky (from 1937 up to 1943) with the later poems,

Radnóti’s development, unfortunately through the savage circumstances in which he existed, is clear as his work moves

from that of a fanciful young lover (although sometimes melancholy in temperament) to the condensed and intense style

that marks his later work.

Exuberant earlier poems, such as “Early Summer” (1939), “Love Poem” (1939), and “Two

Fragments” (1939), with all their melodious nature veneration, slowly give way to darker, tighter, later poems. In “Spring

Flies” (1942), Radnóti writes in the first stanza:

Ice skims the river, the shores turn dark in patches.

Snow melts. The first rays of the sun splash

in puddles formed by the footprints of rabbit and deer.

With her hair untied, spring flies over the tops

of lazy mountains, at the bottom of tunnels, inside mole hills.

She runs over the roots of trees, near the arch of a bud’s soft armpit,

she rests on the stems of fragile leaves, then she runs off.

Everywhere in the meadow, at the top of the hill, over rippling lakes,

the sky flares blue.

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Radnóti is playful and lighthearted here: the ice “skims” the river; the rays of the sun “splash” in puddles; there

are rabbit and deer, those gentle denizens of the forest; and his personification of spring is surprising and delightful,

conjuring the image of a carefree young maiden with “her hair untied.” Tenderness suffuses the poem (mountains are

“lazy,” leaves are “fragile,” the bud has a “soft armpit,” and the lakes are “rippling”), and this is accomplished by the

writer’s iambic diction, the soft syllabic stress conveying a balmy mood. Line length is long and relaxed, with no line

shorter than a pentameter, with the exception of the last line—it’s very shortness as startling as the flaring blue sky he

describes. This is a nostalgic and romantic style: constantly evolving (a characteristic of true artists), Radnóti’s first

published work (prior to 1935) was heavily Surrealist and avant-garde, but his mid-career work here exhibits a more

classical style, no doubt influenced by his superb education and classical translation work. In “Spring Flies,” Radnóti is

Byronic and invigorating, and these are the joyous words of a man in love with nature.

When the last poem’s fragment is compared to the last two stanzas in the later poem, “Landscape in a Dream”

(1944), the change within Radnóti is obvious:

Suddenly the landscape disappears,

on huge wings.

A bird, chased by terror,

is pushed across a clouded sky.

In my heart loneliness is sweeter

and death is a closer relative.

Here the poet uses shorter, clipped lines, with no line longer than a pentameter. Stress is trochaic for the most

part, such as in the third and fourth lines of the first stanza—a bird, “chased by terror,” is “pushed” across the “clouded”

sky. This emphasis on the short line, the trochaic stress, and the diction, work in concert to convey fear and doom. Finally,

in the last two lines, heavy sadness is apparent, relayed especially with “loneliness” and “death.” This is a marked

difference from earlier poems.

Consider these first two stanzas from the earlier “Flower Song” (1942):

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Above you, an apple branch.

Petals fall on your lips,

a few late ones trickle down

into your hair and eyes.

All day I look at your mouth.

Branches bend to your eyes.

Light skims their light,

a spirit waking to be kissed.

Though the lines in this poem are short, they are frisky rather than clipped, and Radnóti attains this by diction

choice, his words revealing desire for his subject, such as in the first stanza, with “petals fall on your lips,” and the

mention of “your hair and eyes,” and then in the second stanza with “All day I look at your mouth,” and “a spirit waking

to be kissed.” There is an ethereal quality to these stanzas conveyed in the lines, “a few late ones trickle down,” and then

“Branches bend to your eyes. / Light skims their light.” The mere mention of the “apple branch” in the first stanza evokes

a mood; that of a sun-dappled spring day, and when combined with the image of petals falling and the addition of the

other—of the beloved subject—Radnóti quite engages the senses and conveys a delicate moment in the lives of young

lovers everywhere.

The idyllic theme of nature is evident in other earlier Radnóti poems, such as “Early Summer” (1939): “I sit in a

small meadow. The grass reaches up to my shoulder, / it whispers and sways. A butterfly drifts past” (1.1 – 2); and

further, “Words touch my face: milkweed, / I whisper, and you, sparkling primrose […] / color waving on the edge of the

ditch!” (3.1 – 4). In “Love Poem” (1939), Radnóti even gushes, “O soft guardian of the seasons, how I love you!” (3.1)

When briefly contrasted with later poems, the nature theme takes on a more sinister aspect, and it happens gradually and

sporadically over the years until the poet’s death. In “Autumn Begins Impatiently” (1941), Radnóti writes in the first

stanza: “From between wild iron-grey flags / the sun billows impatiently, its gases rush and bend. Streaming away, / light

cuts into the lowering fog.” This is not the whispering and swaying of grasses with butterflies drifting past as in “Early

Summer,” this is a darkened mood—and it is evident in the diction alone: the color is “iron-grey,” the sun “billows

impatiently,” gases “rush and bend,” the light “cuts” into “lowering fog.” Later on, in the fourth stanza, a lizard “scuttles

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along the walls of big graveyards,” and the “hungry madness / of autumn wasps” (4.1 – 2) enters the poem. The “mad

rattle of distant wagons / shakes the remaining / leaves from the trees” (8.2 – 4). These are the metaphors of an

approaching death, and Radnóti’s melancholy carries over into other poems. In “If You Listen to Me…” (1942), even nice

weather can’t cheer him: “The sky flows blue above me. / Since before dawn today, the sadness / of wet umbrellas has

drizzled inside me. / The sun shines uselessly, / depressing, like a two day beard” (3.1 – 5). As noted above, this sinister

and dismal nature aspect appears sporadically, and not all of the 1942 poems are dark—both the lighthearted and

aforementioned “Spring Flies” and “Flower Song” were written during this period, as well. Radnóti still harbors a love of

nature that cannot be denied, right up until his final poems, even, and this will be further discussed.

The love theme is also especially prevalent in Radnóti’s work during this period. In “Simple-Minded

Song About My Wife” (1940), he writes:

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The door rattles when she steps in,

flowerpots click

and in her hair a small dreamy blond streak

chirps like a panicky sparrow.

The old wire lightcord squawks too,

brushing its awkward body against her.

Everything spins. I can’t even write about it.

She has come back. She has been gone all day.

There is the large petal of a poppy in her hand.

She’ll chase away death with it.

Radnóti clearly has great love for his wife, and other possible love poems to her include “In Your Arms” (1941),

“Charm” (1942), “I Hid You” (1942), and the aforementioned “Flower Song” (1942). It is questionable, however, if these

poems were all written for Fanny—it is well-known that Radnóti had an affair with a woman named Judit Beck in 1941,

as recorded in his diaries. This incident, occurring at a time of immense socio-psychological stress, did not appear to

lessen the poet’s feelings toward his wife, as he continued to write pieces to/for her, and it is unclear whether Fanny

Radnóti knew of the affair. It has been argued by Radnóti’s biographer, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, that certain love poems from

the 1941 – 1942 period, when studied alongside Radnóti’s diaries, may have been written to Beck, including “Rainstorm”

(1941): “But my body reaches out / toward you, the strong web of my muscles / remembers your wild embrace, your

love / and is tortured by sadness” (2.1 – 4); and further, “Nothing, nothing, not even this rainstorm / will wash away my

desire for you” (3.4 – 5); and “The Third Ecologue” (1941):

Shepherd Muse, help me! All the trumpets of dawn scream

about her now! In a deep, foggy voice they sing about her figure,

how her body shines, how an awkward smile lights up in her eyes,

how a sigh starts with clever dance steps on her lips,

how she moves, how she embraces, how she looks at the moon! (4.1 – 5)

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The poems ends with the lines, “Can I still write about / love? / Her body shines for me, O Shepherd Muse, help

me!” (6.4 – 6). Though it is sometimes difficult to separate the poems written for his wife (although, he often mentions

Fanny’s blond hair), one connecting factor of the possible Beck poems is the theme of passionate longing, whereas poems

to his wife exhibit a sturdier, quieter basis. Regardless, there is still much evidence of the deep love he feels for his wife

throughout Clouded Sky, and it is Fanny he addresses in his final days. In “A Letter to My Wife” (1944), he writes: “I

don’t know if I’ll see you again. / You who were certain, steady as a psalm, / beautiful as light, beautiful as shadow, / I

could find you without a voice, without eyes” (2.1 – 4). Further along he writes, “…I’ll still find you. / I’ve walked all

the miles of the soul for you” (4.8), and “On deep red ashes, / in a rain of fire if I have to, / I’ll use magic but I’ll get back”

(5.1 – 3). These are the fortifying words of a man still intent on living, on returning to his wife, written approximately two

months before his death, and they are contained within five fleshed-out stanzas. The love Radnóti imparts for Fanny in

these lines has all the pathos of a fable, wherein he can find her “without a voice, without eyes,” wherein he will walk on

hot ashes and through a “rain of fire,” even use magic to get back to her, echoing the trials of Odysseus in returning to his

cherished Penelope. In the end, however, even though he is willing to “walk all the miles of the soul” for her in his poem,

his was a real, tragic life, and the forced march ultimately claimed him. There is no happy reunion as in the Greek myth.

The later poems of Clouded Sky continue their downward spiral into the madness of the

times. In “Fragment” (1944), the gradual change in the poet’s mood is still further pronounced:

I lived on this earth in an age

when man fell so low

he killed willingly, for pleasure, without orders.

Vile obsessions threaded his life,

he believed in false gods. Deluded, he foamed at the mouth.

I lived on this earth in an age

when it was an honor to betray and to murder,

the traitor and the thief were heroes—

those who were silent, unwilling to rejoice,

were hated as if they carried the plague.

I lived on this earth in an age

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when if a man spoke out, he had to vanish

and could only chew his fists in shame—

drunk on blood and scum, the nation went lost its mind

and grinned at its savage fate.

I lived on this earth in an age

when a curse was the mother of a child,

when women were happy if they miscarried,

a glass of thick poison foamed on the table,

and the living envied the rotting silence of the dead.

I lived on this earth in an age

where the poets too were silent

and waited for Isaiah, the scholar

of words that scorched his lips, to speak again—

since only he could utter the right curse.

Here Radnóti imparts a stark reality by the use of matter-of-fact statement. There is no loveliness about this poem.

The world has become a dismal place to live, indeed. Again, it is in the diction that the change in the poet is most

conspicuous. From the happy lightness of the earlier diction, we now have words such as “vile,” “plague,” “scum,”

“curse,” “miscarried,” “thick poison,” “rotting,” and “silence of the dead,” among other examples. There is a furious

though restrained bitterness divulged in the first line alone: “I lived on this earth in an age,” which reads like an allegation

and condemnation at the same time. With the repetition of this line at the beginning of every stanza, beating like a drum,

the poem has the feel of control, as if the poet was suppressing an earthquake of rage to maintain sanity, and this is

perhaps conveyed by the mixture of dreadful subject matter, line-length, each line completing one very specific thought,

and lack of enjambment. The fourth stanza is perhaps the most intense, as it drives home the utter emotional devastation

of the era—when “women were happy if they miscarried,” for how could a mother bring a child into such a world, a

world that would most likely crush them, a world in which “infants are smashed against walls” (as he writes in “The

Eighth Ecologue”)? This issue is not exclusive to “Fragment”. The Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever and his wife, who

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spent time in Auschwitz before escaping to the forest, had a newborn baby that was murdered by the Nazis—poisoned, in

fact. Sutzkever writes in “To My Wife” (1943):

But still before we thought

a name for him that’s right,

The axes and crowbars

Have plundered in the night.

The babe knew not a thing,

It dozed off in its rest,

A German came and ripped him

Away from mother’s breast.

And what can take its place,

Dear, desolate and wild,

When from afar they glow,

The small bones of our child.

(II.2 – 4)

As shocking and heartbreaking as the thought might be, Radnóti’s “glass of thick poison” foaming on the table is

a much more emotionally viable option for a pregnant woman in these circumstances than allowing the Nazis a chance to

murder her offspring.

What is curious about the last stanza of “Fragment” is Radnóti’s statement that “the poets too were silent” in this

age, but this seems to be more of a metaphor than an actuality, as the cannon of Holocaust poetry attests. When taken in

conjunction with the lines about Isaiah, this makes sense, as the Bible’s “Book of Isaiah” prophesies the judgments

awaiting those nations intent on persecuting the Jews. Though Germany is not specifically mentioned, Radnóti’s

modernization of the ancient prophesies have a threatening ring, as only Isaiah “could utter the right curse” against

Germany—hence any word written in the meantime by mortal poets are ineffective and void in Radnóti’s eyes.

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“Fragment” is a powerful poem, and all of Radnóti’s anguish is contained within it, along with all of the perceived

anguish of his entire race, of a time when “the living envied the rotting silence of the dead.”

Yet, there is still a survivor’s heart beating within the poet. In “Forced March” (1944), despite the harsh physical

circumstances of his plight and his near-crippling doubt, Radnóti rallies for life, with the love of his wife, his life back

home, and the gentle promise of the natural world spurring him onward:

You’re crazy. You fall down, stand up and walk again,

your ankles and your knees move

but you start again as if you had wings.

The ditch calls you, but it’s no use you’re afraid to stay,

and if someone asks why, maybe you turn around and say

that a woman and a sane death a better death wait for you.

But you’re crazy. For a long time

only the burned wind spins above the houses at home,

Walls lie on their backs, plum trees are broken

and the angry night is thick with fear.

Oh, if I could believe that everything valuable

is not only inside me now that there’s still home to go back to.

If only there were! And just as before bees drone peacefully

on the cool veranda, plum preserves turn cold

and over sleepy gardens quietly, the end of summer bathes in

the sun.

Among the leaves the fruit swings naked

and in front of the rust brown hedge blond Fanny waits for me,

the morning writes slow shadows—

All this could happen the moon is so round today!

Don’t walk past me, friend. Yell, and I’ll stand up again!

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This poem is a last cry for survival. When Radnóti falls down on the march, he is somehow able to “stand up and

walk again” as if he had “wings.” He refuses to die in the roadside ditch, because “a woman and a sane death […] a better

death” await. He feels he is crazy, and that “the angry night […] is thick with fear,” yet the thought that “there’s still home

to go back to,” that “blond Fanny waits,” urges him forward. “All this could happen,” he tells us, “Don’t walk past me,

friend. Yell, and I’ll stand up again!” Interestingly, this is the only poem in the last series of poems that does not employ

the short, clipped line. This may be due to different reasons, or a combination of them: Radnóti admits in the first line that

he is “crazy,” which is certainly understandable given the barbarous conditions of the forced march. This “craziness” may

have caused him to lose the careful control over his words. The sense of a man losing his mind comes across in the surreal

lines, “only the burned wind spins […] above the houses at home, / Walls lie on their backs, […] plum trees are broken.”

Yet the reversion to the longer, more expansive lines may also be due to the fact that love for his wife, and love for the

natural world, are the thoughts keeping him going—and when Radnóti wrote of such subjects in the past, he utilized the

longer line. There are hints of the earlier style in such lines as “And just as before […] bees drone peacefully / on the cool

veranda, […] plum preserves turn cold / and over sleepy gardens […] quietly, the end of summer bathes in / the sun.” The

major difference between line length in the earlier poems versus this poem, is the fragmented nature of the line. With the

exception of the second line of the poem, in all other lines exists a substantial caesura, which seems to relay the stop-and-

go, zombie-like shuffle of someone on a forced march, as if the poet is imparting not only the weariness of his mind and

soul, but his actual physical status with the rhythm of his words and lines. This is extraordinary, whether it was intended

or not—clearly this would be quite a poetic feat to accomplish in the circumstances Radnóti was enduring—perhaps it

was his subconscious, an ingrained poetic ability being the only means left with which to express existence. What is most

interesting about the missing caesura in the second line is that it implies movement, yes, but movement of a different sort:

“your ankles and your knees move.” Taken in consideration with the lines immediately before and after, this movement of

the second line is the body on automatic pilot, the body apparently moving of its own volition, ragdoll-like, seemingly

without the consciousness of the mind as exhibited in the first line, such as in the self-realization that he is “crazy,” and in

the thought of the third line where he felt he had “wings.”

The feelings, as well as similar physical effects, of Radnóti’s “Forced March” closely resemble the experience of

another Holocaust writer, Elie Wiesel, who was subjected to a forced march himself. In 1945, as the liberating Soviet

army approached Auschwitz, where Wiesel was detained, roughly 60,000 inmates were herded out into the winter

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landscape and forced to march back to Germany. Wiesel recounts some of the same physical sensations as Radnóti in his

memoir, Night (1960):

I was putting one foot in front of the other mechanically. I was dragging

with me this skeletal body which weighed so much. If only I could have

got rid of it! In spite of my efforts not to think about it, I could feel myself

as two entities—my body and me. I hated it.

(81)

Also resembling Radnóti’s first few lines in “Forced March,” Wiesel writes: “I had gone on running without

feeling my throbbing foot, without realizing that I was running, without being conscious that I owned a body galloping

there on the road with so many others” (82)—again, as if the body were on automatic pilot, moving of its own volition—

especially when he writes a few paragraphs later, “Our legs were moving mechanically, in spite of us, without us” (83).

Wiesel states further that, “I was simply walking in my sleep,” and that he was letting himself be “dragged along by a

blind destiny” (83). It is the thought of leaving his still-surviving father behind that urges Wiesel to continue: “I had no

right to let myself die. What would he do without me?” (82) These lines echo Radnóti’s in “Forced March” about why he

continues, about what keeps him going: “a woman and a sane death.” Where Radnóti writes about how the ditch called to

him, Wiesel fantasizes about giving in, as well:

The idea of dying, of no longer being, began to fascinate me. Not to exist

any longer. Not to feel the terrible pains in my foot. Not to feel anything,

neither weariness, nor cold, nor anything. To break the ranks, to let oneself

slide to the edge of the road…

(82)

There are other correlations, such as the feeling of craziness. In the surreal lines of Radnóti, “only the burned

wind spins […] above the houses at home, / Walls lie on their backs, […] plum trees are broken / and the angry night […]

is thick with fear,” while Wiesel recounts, “Around me everything was dancing a dance of death. It made my head reel. I

was walking in a cemetery, among stiffened corpses, logs of wood” (84). Though the similarity between the two works is

uncanny, the biggest difference was in the actual, historical outcome of these separate marches: Wiesel survived.

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The macabre and extreme tribulation of the forced marches that so many were subjected to during the Holocaust

also resonates (albeit in different form) in Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” written in 1944, which presents the horrifying and

bizarre world of a Nazi death camp. The poem is set to a relentless, disturbing musical beat, where prisoners labor under

the shadow of the crematoria while an orchestra (formed also of prisoners forced by their captors), play to the grim scene.

This is the infamous “Death Tango” Celan is referring to, a practice at Auschwitz and other death camps, of forcing

musicians to play whenever executions were being carried out. It is because of Celan’s incantatory rhythm in the poem

that the abomination is made that much more real:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped

A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes

he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Maguerite

he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling

he whistles his hounds to come close

he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground

he orders us strike up and play for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening

we drink and we drink

A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes

he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite

your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped

He shouts jab this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play

he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue

jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

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Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland

we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink

this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue

he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true

a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete

he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air

he plays with his vipers and daydreams

der Tod is ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein achenes Haar Shulamith

With the repetition of the word “drink,” the lack of punctuation, and the all-powerful beat, a child’s dark nursery

rhyme is implied (as in “ashes, ashes, we all fall down”), mimicking the emotional landscape, and loosely, the stop-and-go

shuffle of Radnóti’s “Forced March,” and Wiesel’s experiences in Night. What is most striking about these two poems

and Wiesel’s account is the similarity of the situation: they all convey a depraved puppet show of sorts, a world gone mad,

where the mummers are skeletons who keep moving against all rationale. Beyond that similarity, the overall feeling in

Radnóti’s “Forced March” (and in Wiesel’s experience also) is that he was writing it as much with his body as with his

mind, that the physical self is carrying (barely, but nonetheless) his tormented consciousness across the land, his hope like

a glowing ember inside of him. Without this element, Radnóti is already a ghost.

Understandably, in the face of all this madness and death, one

theme especially prevalent in the work of Holocaust writers is that of the seeming loss of God. Though all people,

regardless of race or religion, are capable of imagining the immense psychological and emotional devastation wrought

upon the Jews, the questioning of faith is an especially bewildering philosophical dilemma for such a devout race

suffering in the face of pure evil. There is the age-old philosophical argument—wherein the inexistence of God must be a

fact due to existence of evil—based on the premises that: if a) evil exists; b) God is omnipotent; and c) God is all-loving,

then the argument follows: if God can prevent evil, but doesn’t, then He is not all-loving; if God intends to prevent evil

but cannot, then He is not omnipotent; and if God intends to prevent evil and is capable of doing so, then how can evil

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exist? In light of such reasoning, for those imprisoned in the ghettos and labor and death camps, subjected to the most

profane and depraved acts, it is understandable that there is some very, very angry Holocaust poetry out there—anger

directed at a helpless God who appeared to have abandoned His children. Wladyslaw Szlengel, who was detained in the

Warsaw ghetto, was in a particular quandary about his relationship to God, in the poem, “Account with God” (1943).

After listing all of the good deeds of his pious life, and then cataloguing all the brutality he had been subjected to in spite

of his piety, Szlengel mockingly addresses God: “Do You still expect that / The day after tomorrow like in the Testament /

When going to the Prussian gas / I shall still say ‘Amen’ to You?” (22.1 – 4) Yet, it is in another of Szlengel’s poems,

“It’s About Time,” that he releases the flood of his anger at God:

It’s about time! About time!

He has frightened us for so long with the day of reckoning!

Now we have had enough of prayers and penances.

Today you shall face our judgment

And shall await the verdict humbly.

With a mighty stone we’ll throw onto your heart

The blasphemous, horrendous and blood stained accusation.

--With the edge of a battleaxe, with the blades of sabres

It shall burst into the heaven like the Tower of Babel.

And you, up there, the great convict,

You up there in the horrible interstellar silence,

Will be able to hear every word of ours,

How the chosen people are bringing charges against you

--No, payback, payback!!!

This that once you, so many years ago,

Had led us out from Eygpt into our land,

Will change nothing! It will change nothing!

Now we shall not forgive you any longer

That you have been turning us in, into the hands of thugs—

That, for the millennia,

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We have been to you like faithful children,

With your name each of us was dying

In the arenas of the Caesars, in Nero’s circus.

On the crosses of the Romans, on the stakes of Spain

We, the beaten and reviled, the manhandled.

And you turned us in to Cossacks

Who ripped your Holy Covenant to shreds.

For the agony of the Ghetto, for the spectre of the gallows

We the humiliated, we the tormented—

For the death in Treblinka, we bent under the whip,

We will pay back! We will pay you back!

--Now you will not escape your end!

When we bring you to the slaying place.

You will not be able to bribe the bathhouse guard

With a 100-dollar golden disc of sun.

And when the hangman will have driven and forced you

And hermetically closed the hatch behind you,

The hot steam will begin to suffocate, to suffocate you,

And you will scream, you will try to escape—

And after the torture of dying will have ended

They will drag your body along and throw it into a monstrous pit,

They will pull your stars out—the gold teeth out of your jaw—

At the end they will burn you

And you will become ashes.

Szlengel’s anger at God, “as the great convict,” sitting up in heaven in His “interstellar silence,” while his flock is

barbarically murdered in droves, certainly seems justified. It is not just anger at God people were feeling—others have

spoken about their complete loss of faith during those years of imprisonment, such as John Chilag, a survivor of

Auschwitz, who was detained in the camp when he was sixteen years old. When interviewed years later by the BBC for a

program called “The Holocaust: Where was God?” Chilag stated that: “I hoped that I didn’t lose hope, but by 1944,

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everyone just had to survive another day and then another day and another day. There were far too many other days to

come but nevertheless that was the only hope we had. I’m afraid my faith didn’t help me.” Another survivor, Arek Hersh,

who was taken to a concentration camp at just eleven years old, said that “There was no hope in some of the camps. Every

day there was starvation and beatings, so you do lose hope,” and, “Towards the end I didn't think there was a God, I didn’t

have faith anymore.” Hersh speaks of an incident wherein he was questioning a Rabbi: “I asked him: ‘Why men, women,

and children that did nothing wrong? They were gassed and burned, why? If there is a God why did he allow that to

happen?’” Such questioning was predominant in the face of the circumstances, the case of “The Loss of God” being an

added torment on top of everything else. In Night, Elie Wiesel recounts the story of a young boy (a “sad-eyed angel”), and

two adults who were being hung upon the gallows: “’Where is God? Where is He?’ someone behind me asked” (61). As

the witnesses are made to file past the grim scene, Wiesel writes:

The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen,

blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the

child was still alive…For more than half an hour he stayed there,

struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our

eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive

when I passed in front of him. His tongue still red, his eyes

were not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him:

‘Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows…’

(61 – 62)

A lot of the men, women, and children suffering through these years must have thought that God was dead,

questioning not only His existence, but the seeming indifference or abandonment if He was actually still in existence. The

philosopher Martin Buber addresses this dilemma in his book, Eclipse of God, formulating the theory that there are dark

and evil periods in which God is absent, perhaps historic periods which will eventually end: “Eclipse of the light of

heaven, eclipse of God—such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing” (1). With so

many questioning the existence of God, or expressing anger at their seeming abandonment, we must wonder, where was

Radnóti in all of this?

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Religious faith is not a major theme in Clouded Sky. In fact, with a few minor exceptions, Radnóti is noticeably

silent about the matter. There is no ongoing dialogue or argument with God in his work, except for “The Eighth

Ecologue” (1944), wherein the poet calmly questions an enraged prophet about the injustices of humankind. There are

apparent reasons for this silence: Radnóti, as exhibited through his earlier work, is more nature-oriented, more pagan than

religious; also, as part of the intelligentsia of his day, there was a natural distancing from the religious, which may have

been considered superstitious; and finally, he had been born into an assimilated Jewish family—he was never brought up

as a Jew—and had later converted to Catholicism, in 1943, in an effort to avoid deportation to the camps. Quite simply, he

did not consider himself a religious, practicing Jew. As Radnóti recorded in his diary on May 27, 1942, “I never

renounced my Jewishness. I still belong to that ‘Jewish denomination’…but I don’t feel a Jew. I was never instructed in

the religion, I don’t need it and don’t practice it, I find race, blood, roots and the ancient sorrow trembling in the nerves

rubbish, things that don’t define my ‘intellect,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘poetry’” (Ferencz, 3). If anything, Radnóti viewed the

Holocaust as the culmination of the universal struggle between good versus evil, and his last poems are written with such

intelligence, bravery, clarity, and restraint—with the poet-reporter’s keen and exacting eye—that it is near-impossible to

imagine him lamenting, beating his chest and cursing God. He well knew the situation, well knew the probable outcome,

and, like an irreligious martyr, solemnly went to meet his fate with a vague and faltering hope that he might make it out

alive.

In the final poems written over the following weeks of his life, melancholy reigns in Radnóti’s

tone. In the poem “Root” (1944), he writes:

Power glides in the root,

drinking rain, living in the earth,

and its fantasy is white snow.

It rises and breaks through the soil,

It crawls along secretly.

Its arm is like a rope.

On the root’s arm a worm sleeps

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and a worm sticks to its leg.

The world is rotten with worms.

But the root goes on living below.

It is the branch, laden with leaves,

that it lives for, not the world.

This is what it feeds and loves,

sending exquisite tastes up to it,

sweet tastes out of the sky.

I am a root myself now,

living among worms.

This poem is written down there.

I was a flower. I became a root.

A lid of black earth locks me in.

The workers on my life are done.

A saw wails over my head.

It is amazing at this point that the poet still harbors hope: as the metaphor of the root applies to him, he still has

“power,” and that power could be construed as his mental power over his captors, in that he is still able to choose to want

death (the “fantasy” of “white snow”). Like the root, his consciousness “crawls along secretly,” goes on “living below.”

This power could also be construed as his spirit or soul, which no one can take away from him—even though his

tormentors are doing their best to destroy him, Radnóti’s spirit will win in the end. The reference to worms could be

interpreted as Radnóti’s feelings toward his captors—at those parasites, the guards, sucking away at his life—as well as an

augury of his own death, especially when taken in consideration of the last two stanzas. Roots and worms exist

underground, companions of the dead—and Radnóti tells us, “This poem is written down there,” which not only alludes to

the hell-on-earth he is experiencing at the moment, the dark underground of camp “life,” but the grave that is awaiting

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him. With an eerie, near-psychic conjecture, he writes, “I was a flower. I became a root. / A lid of black earth locks me

in.” He is underground emotionally, mentally, and spiritually here, and soon, he knows, his physical self will also enter

into the dark of the dirt, and he tells us, “The workers on my life are done.” Yet, there is also the knowledge that life will

continue after he is gone: “A saw wails over my head.” Once again, as in most of Radnóti’s last poems, the lines are short,

declarative, and restrained, with the crystalline precision of the heart of the matter. Gone forever is the younger man who

once wrote serene nature and love poems.

“Root” is not the only death prophesy Radnóti recorded in his poems. While it is true that every one of us harbors

the vague knowledge of our own impending deaths in some unknowable manner, at some unknowable time in the future,

Radnóti was not only sure about his demise at the hands of the Nazis, but often quite prophetic about the manner in which

it would happen, and he moved from the vague to the more detailed as time passed. As early as 1939, in a fragment

written for his book, The Steep Road, he writes: “I am the one they’ll kill finally, / because I myself never killed” (4.1 –

2). In his title poem, “Clouded Sky” (1940), he is “surprised” that he still lives. In “Maybe…” (1940), Radnóti wants to

die “without fear, / a clean lovely death, / like Empedocles, who smiled as he fell / into the crater” (8.1 – 4). Both “With

Your Hand on the Back of My Head” (1941), and “In Your Arms” (1941) were written to his wife after he awoke from

terrifying nightmares of his imminent death. The poem “Autumn Begins Impatiently” (1941) is one long metaphor for his

death. In “Winter Sunlight” (1942), he asks: “Am I waiting just for lunch / or for death too?” (4.1 – 2). And in “The

Fourth Ecologue” (1943), Radnóti notes, “Death blows among the trees. // And I know I’m ripe for death” (7/8.4/1), and

“I will be free, the earth will let go of me” (9.1). In “The Terrifying Angel” (1943), an angel in a dream tells him, “Skin

shouldn’t cover you. / You’re raw meat and bare nerves. / Tear it off!” (3.31 – 33). And in “Not Even Memory, No

Magic” (1944), Radnóti knows that “not even memory, no magic / will save me—there’s evil in the sky” (2.7 – 8). These

are mere examples of the actual death he writes of in his poems, while the hidden metaphors of death sprinkled throughout

all of his later poems are too numerous to mention.

It is in the horrible, heart-wrenching final poem, “Postcards” (1944), written over the last four weeks of his life,

that Radnóti most accurately senses his impending death. There is little in the way of hope, and he instead becomes the

documenter of his own demise, leaving his poetic testimony behind. This last poem is truly a poetry of witness, and

Radnóti records for posterity the reality of human atrocity. His choice of title is chilling—the usual connotation of the

word “postcard” conjuring up happy vacation times, perhaps scenic beauty—but here, Radnóti’s postcards are instead the

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postcards of a journey across a hellish landscape, a landscape of death, sent at the intervals indicating the very last stages

of his life. In “Postcard 1” he writes:

From Bulgaria the huge wild pulse of artillery.

It beats on the mountain ridge, then hesitates and falls.

Men, animals, wagons and thoughts. They are swelling.

The road whinnies and rears up. The sky gallops.

You are permanent within me in this chaos.

Somewhere deep in my mind you shine forever, without

moving, silent, like the angel awed by death,

or like the insect burying itself

in the rotted heart of a tree.

Radnóti, with his inclination to personify nature, here catalogs the landscape with an extrasensory gift. He intuits

that the land, as much as the people, seems to be experiencing the horror of war: the sound of artillery “beats” upon the

mountains and “hesitates and falls.” The road “whinnies and rears up,” the sky “gallops.” This imparts a sense of the

disorder all around him when combined with the human element: “Men, animals, wagons and thoughts. They are

swelling.” The last five lines of the poem are a final message of love for his wife—despite the swirling terror and

confusion all around, he writes to her, “You are permanent within me in this chaos,” proving that once again, it is the

thought of her that keeps him going. Radnóti has also returned to his shorter, lucid lines in this last series of poems.

In “Postcard 2,” a love for his country and his people is evident, and reveals the effect the war is having on the

inhabitants:

Nine miles from here

the haystacks and houses burn,

and on the edges of the meadow

there are quiet, frightened peasants, smoking.

The little shepherd girl seems

to step into the lake, the water ripples.

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The ruffled sheepfold

bends to the clouds and drinks.

Notwithstanding that the “haystacks and houses burn,” and the peasants are “frightened,” interestingly, the natural

imagery of the shepherd girl creating ripples in the water and the sheep drinking seem to relay a knowledge that the world

will go on after the poet, himself, has ceased to be; that nature will always triumph, no matter what humankind

perpetuates upon itself. It is only in the first two poems of this series that any semblance of hope or love exists, however,

as the last two poems embody only terror and dread.

In “Postcard 3,” the four shocking, clipped lines make us wonder how Radnóti even went on writing at such a

point:

Bloody drool hangs on the mouths of the oxen.

The men all piss red.

The company stands around in stinking, wild knots.

Death blows overhead, disgusting.

This is a scene from hell, filled with the imagery and diction of doom. The drool of the oxen is “bloody,” the men

“piss red,” there are “stinking wild knots,” and death “blows overhead,” and is “disgusting.” He writes with supreme

clarity here, with nothing abstract—and death blowing overhead cannot even be considered abstract at this point,

considering the poet and the circumstances—rather, it is a reality, complete with the stench, the blood, and the piss, and

Radnóti knows it’s coming for him, knows he’s a marked man.

In the final poem, “Postcard 4,” written, eerily enough, on Halloween, 1944, his last poem tells us:

I fell next to him. His body rolled over.

It was tight as a violin string before it snaps.

Shot in the back of the head—‘This is how

you’ll end.’ ‘Just lie quietly,’ I said to myself.

Patience flowers into death now.

24

‘Der springt noch auf,’ I heard above me.

Dark filthy blood was drying on my ear.

Again, there are the short, declarative statements: “I fell next to him. His body rolled over. / It was tight as a

violin string before it snaps,” and the poet’s restraint here is as astonishing as the subject matter. Radnóti appears as

rational as ever, although, there is some ambiguity in these last lines: It seems as though another prisoner has been shot to

death, in the back of the head, and the poet has fallen down beside him, still alive. It is a little unclear who is speaking the

statement, “This is how / you’ll end.” Is this the poet thinking to himself, prophesizing his own death, or is it the guard

warning him? The poet then tells himself, “Just lie quietly,” which is in the same language as the prior statement, so that

may indicate both statements are his own thoughts, especially as the German “Der springt noch auf” (“He’s still moving”)

is clearly the guard, speaking above him (where the original was written in Hungarian, the German dialogue indicates the

guard). Unless there is some translation difficulty here, it appears that Radnóti has predicted his own death exactly. And

that death will be a tremendous relief: “Patience flowers into death now.” Finally, as if to never deny reality its due, no

matter how abominable, the poet leaves off forever with the appalling, tragic line, “Dark filthy blood was drying on my

ear.” Even in the face of death, Radnóti does not abandon his cold objectivity toward his subject matter. Even in the face

of death, he is in control of his words.

Though some have criticized the work of Holocaust writers—such

atrocities being linguistically impossible to relay—it is clear that Radnóti and other poets and writers were able to do just

that. It has also been argued that every experience deserves representation and purging, and though nothing seems further

from the filth, squalor, and suffering of Nazi death camps and forced marches than poetry and its aesthetics, people were

writing and recording events nonetheless. There is little chance of trivializing the Holocaust, however. Even Theodor

Adorno, the German philosopher and social critic, later recanted his famous 1949 statement that “writing a poem after

Auschwitz is barbaric,” by remarking: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to

scream…hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.” What historians may take

reams of paper to state, poets can present in a matter of lines, due to the condensed linguistical and emotional nature of

poetry itself. When a poem adheres to itself, a truth has been achieved, that truth being the poet’s own experience, and, as

Aristotle once stated, “literature has a greater claim on the truth than the historical account.” There is no danger here of art

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muting or obfuscating the Holocaust. If anything, the reverse is true: the poems, stories, eyewitness accounts, and

folksongs adding to our understanding of these events. When everything has been stolen, when one’s way of life has been

decimated, and language the only thing left, who is to judge that it is not still a viable means of expression? Certainly,

Celan received some criticism for the song-style of his most famous poem, “Death Fugue,” but as he has written:

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses:

language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure

against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through

terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous

speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was

happening, but went through it. Went through and could

resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.

The poetry of the Holocaust knows no barriers—linguistically, socially, geographically, or racially. Just about

everyone can empathize with the suffering, and to think of silencing any expression of this experience would be doing the

world a disservice. And just who is to judge what is appropriate? If Art Spiegelman can write about his parents’

experience in Auschwitz in comic book form, in Maus I & II: A Survivor’s Tale (1973 & 1986), and do it successfully, in

a surprising and moving way, then anything is possible with material from this era—or from any event or era, for that

matter. Radnóti’s work, among others such as Sutzkever, Levi, and Celan, contradicts these critics. Everything can and

should be remembered, so that history does not repeat itself. In the malediction, “Shema,” Primo Levi writes:

You who live secure

In your warm houses

Who return at evening to find

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,

Who labours in the mud

Who knows no peace

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Who fights for a crust of bread

Consider whether this is a woman,

Without hair or name

With no more strength to remember

Eyes empty and womb cold

As a frog in winter

Consider that this has been:

I commend these words to you.

Engrave them on your hearts

When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,

When you go to bed, when you rise.

Repeat them to your children.

Or your house may crumble,

Disease render you powerless,

Your offspring avert their faces from you.

May we never forget. In his final poems, Radnóti’s voice reverberates with power, that power

intensified by the poet’s restraint in the face of such madness. As Radnóti biographer Zsuzsanna Ozsváth has written of

his poems, “He framed poetic innovation in the pattern of the lyrical tradition, combining the classical forms of the

ancients with modern sensibilities…[the poems] produce magic, conjuring up the unprecedented without becoming

obscure.” The story of Radnóti’s life, his love, his courage, the crystal-clear tone of his poems, and his persistence in

documenting these deplorable events in human history will perhaps last a millennia—and rightfully so—as the mythology

(and lessons) of certain times are of utmost importance to civilization.

27

And so will I wonder…?

I lived, but then in living I was feeble in life and

always knew that they would bury me here in the end,

that year piles upon year, clod on clod, stone on stone,

that the body swells and in the cool maggot-

infested darkness, the naked bone will shiver.

That above, scuttling time is rummaging through my poems

and that I will sink deeper into the ground

All this I knew. But tell me, the work—did that live on?

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Biblio.

Adorno, Theodor. Qtd. in “The Poetry of the Holocaust.” Ghettoes: Education/Culture. Eds. Karen Russell,

Sara Leushke, Natasha Sweeting, Jennifer Rosser. Sept. 29, 2007.

“The Holocaust: Where Was God?” The BBC. Nov. 10, 2007.

The King James Bible. “Book of Isaiah.” Zondervan Publishing House: Grand Rapids, MI. 1962.

Buber, Martin. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. Humanity

Books: Amherst, NY. 1988.

Celan, Paul. “Death Fugue” (1944). Trans. John Felstiner. The Paul Celan Page. Dec. 2, 2007.

---, “Only one thing remained reachable…” Bremen Prize Speech, 1958. Qtd. in “Celan: Poetry and

Politics.” Oct. 14, 2007.

Ferencz, Gyoso. “A New Life of Radnóti.” The Hungarian Quarterly. Vol. XLIII, No. 165, Spring, 2002.

Levi, Primo. “Shema.” Collected Poems. Trans. Ruth Felsman and Brian Swann. Faber and Faber:

London, England. 1988.

Ozsváth, Zsuzsanna. In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti. Indiana

University Press: Bloomington, IN. 2000.

Radnóti, Miklós. Clouded Sky. Trans. Stephen Polgar, Steven Berg, and S.J. Marks. The Sheep Meadow

Press: Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY. Revised Edition. 1972.

---. “And So Will I Wonder…?” Qtd. in Miklós Radnóti: Hungarian Poet. Oct. 13, 2007.

---. “Fragment” (1939). The Steep Road. Qtd. in Miklós Radnóti: Hungarian Poet. Oct. 13, 2007.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I & II: A Survivor’s Tale. Vol I, Eighth Ed.; Vol. II, Fourth Ed. Pantheon Books:

New York, NY. 1973 & 1986.

Sutzkever, Abraham. “To My Wife” (1943). Burnt Pearls: Ghetto Poems of Abraham Sutzkever. Trans.

Seymour Mayne. Mosaic Press: Oakville, Ont. 1981.

---. The Fiddle Rose: Poems 1970 – 1972. Trans. Ruth Whitman. Wayne State University Press: Detroit, MI.

1990.

---. Abraham Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose. Trans. Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. University

of California Press: Berkley, CA. 1991.

Szlengel, Wladyslaw. “An Account With God” (1942), “It’s About Time” (1942). The Wladyslaw Szlengel

Memorial Web Page. Nov. 10, 2007.

Wiesel, Elie. Night (1960). Trans. Stella Rodway. Bantam Books: New York, NY. 25th Anniversary Ed., 1986.

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Image Sources:

Miklós Radnóti: http://hirposta.hu/cikk/4420163/Hetven_eve_halt_meg_Radnoti_Miklos/

A young Miklós and Fanny Radnóti: http://cultura.hu/kultura/anekdota-estere-talalkozas-fifivel/

Gravestone of Miklós Radnóti: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gravestone_of_Miklos_Radnoti_P8270236-1000.jpg