Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas//Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
27//4
Quietly situated beneath the slanting gray steles of the memorial, is a small but profoundly dense information center, where not only the chronology of the holocaust, but an array of personal letters, poems, telegrams and diary entries, family histories, and detailed information about the sites of concentration camps that spread throughout the European continent give a compact and complicated account of the Holocaust against Jewish populations.
The entrance to the central rooms is guided by a chronology spanning the rise of the National Socialists in the Reichstag to the arrival of the Allies in 1945.
The chronology is accompanied with photos of street-life as the Nazis ascended to power, and the text is impossible to read without looking into these initially ‘ordinary’ scenes and observing the increasing brutality and decimation as the Holocaust reached ever more brash extremes of violence and horror. The text remains factual, the photos reveal a plight more terrifying than any summary could ever convey.
Yet throughout, there remain flashes of hope, resistance, perseverance – from examples of community organizing, including schools, cultural events and a circulating press in the ghettos enduring the brutal affects of the fascist policy of forced impoverishment, to the uprisings of 1943, and in the more immediate instances of hope, love and resolution that radiate from the poems, letters and scattered lines depicting final moments and departures for the affected.
This is an information center (decidedly not an exhibition or museum, but simply an information center) that is freely open to the public and worthy of close exploration.
Here are a few poems by Miklós Radnóti, whose poem, Postard 4, was on display at the center:
Postcard 2
by Miklós Radnóti
written October 6, 1944 near Crvenka, Serbia
translated by Michael R. Burch
A few miles away they’re incinerating
the haystacks and the houses,
while squatting here on the fringe of this pleasant meadow,
the shell-shocked peasants quietly smoke their pipes.
Now, here, stepping into this still pond, the little shepherd girl
sets the silver water a-ripple
while, leaning over to drink, her flocculent sheep
seem to swim like drifting clouds.
Lines from “I cannot know”
… For we are guilty too, as other peoples are,
knowing full-well when and how and why we’ve sinned so far,
but workers live here too, and poets, without sin
and tiny babies in whom intellect will flourish;
it shines in them and they guard it, hiding in dark cellars
until the finger of peace once again marks our nation,
and with fresh voices they will answer our muffled words.
Cover us with your big wings, vigil-keeping evening cloud.
War Diary
1. Monday Evening
You see, now fear often fingers your heart,
and at times the world seems only distant news;
the old trees guard your childhood for you
as an ever more ancient memory.
Between suspicious mornings and foreboding nights
you have lived half your life among wars,
and now once more, order is glinting toward you
on the raised points of bayonets.
In dreams sometimes the landscape still rises before you,
the home of your poetry, where the scent of freedom
wafts over the meadows, and in the morning when you wake,
you carry the scent with you.
Rarely, when you are working, you half-sit, frightened
at your desk. And it’s as if you were living in soft mud;
your hand, adorned with a pen, moves heavily
and ever more gravely.
The world is turning into another war—a hungry cloud
gobbles the sky’s mild blue, and as it darkens,
your young wife puts her arms around you,
and weeps.
2. Tuesday Evening
Now I sleep peacefully
and slowly go about my work—
gas, airplanes, bombs are poised against me,
I can neither be afraid, nor cry;
so I live hard, like the road builders
among the cold mountains,
who, if their flimsy house
crumbles over them with age,
put up a new one, and meanwhile
sleep deeply on fragrant wood shavings,
and in the morning, splash their faces
in the cold and shining streams.
I live high up, and peer around:
it is getting darker.
As when from a ship’s prow
at the flash of lightning
the watchman cries out, thinking he sees land,
so I believe in the land also—and still I cry out life!
with a whitened voice.
And the sound of my voice brightens
and is carried far away
with a cool star and a cool evening wind.
3. Weary Afternoon
A dying wasp flies in at the window,
my dreaming wife talks in her sleep,
and the hems of the browning clouds
are blown to fringes by a gentle breeze.
What can I talk about? Winter is coming, and war is coming;
soon I will lie broken, seen by no one;
worm-ridden earth will fill my mouth and eyes
and roots will pierce through my body.
Oh, gently rocking afternoon, give me peace—
I will lie down too, and work later.
The light of your sun is already hanging on the hedges,
and yonder the evening comes across the hills.
They have killed a cloud, its blood is falling on the sky;
below, on the stems of the glowing leaves
sit wine-scented yellow berries.
4. Evening Approaches
Across the slick sky the sun is climbing down,
and the evening is coming early along the road.
Its coming is watched in vain by the sharp-eyed moon—
little puffs of mist are gathering.
The hedgerow is wakening, it catches at a weary wanderer;
the evening is spinning among the tree branches
and humming louder and louder, while these lines build up
and lean on one another.
A frightened squirrel springs into my quiet room,
and here a six-footed iambic couplet scampers by.
From the wall to the window, a brown moment—
and it’s gone without a trace.
The fleeting peace disappears with it. Silent
worms crawl over the far fields
and slowly chew to pieces the endless
rows of the reclining dead.
“Miklós Radnóti [1909-1944], a Hungarian Jew and fierce anti-fascist, is perhaps the greatest of the Holocaust poets. He was born in Budapest in 1909. In 1930, at the age of 21, he published his first collection of poems, Pogány köszönto (Pagan Salute). 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 coloniale” 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; 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), which were precurors 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. From 1940 on, 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 poetic 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, on November 9, 1944, along with 21 other prisoners who 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.”
And so will I wonder…?
Miklós Radnóti
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?
