{"id":1138,"date":"2016-04-29T13:30:07","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T20:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.evergreen.edu\/joyyzzaa\/?p=141"},"modified":"2016-04-29T13:30:07","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T20:30:07","slug":"denkmal-fur-die-ermordeten-juden-europas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/denkmal-fur-die-ermordeten-juden-europas\/","title":{"rendered":"Denkmal f\u00fcr die ermordeten Juden Europas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Denkmal
\nDenkmal f\u00fcr die ermordeten Juden Europas<\/em><\/span>\/\/Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe<\/p>\n

27\/\/4<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here are a few poems by Mikl\u00f3s Radn\u00f3ti, whose poem, Postard 4, was on display at the center:
\n
\nPostcard 2<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Mikl\u00f3s Radn\u00f3ti
\nwritten October 6, 1944 near Crvenka, Serbia
\ntranslated by Michael R. Burch
\n<\/em>
\nA few miles away they’re incinerating
\nthe haystacks and the houses,
\nwhile squatting here on the fringe of this pleasant meadow,
\nthe shell-shocked peasants quietly smoke their pipes.
\nNow, here, stepping into this still pond, the little shepherd girl
\nsets the silver water a-ripple
\nwhile, leaning over to drink, her flocculent sheep
\nseem to swim like drifting clouds.<\/p>\n

Lines from “I cannot know”<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

… For we are guilty too, as other peoples are,
\nknowing full-well when and how and why we’ve sinned so far,
\nbut workers live here too, and poets, without sin
\nand tiny babies in whom intellect will flourish;
\nit shines in them and they guard it, hiding in dark cellars
\nuntil the finger of peace once again marks our nation,
\nand with fresh voices they will answer our muffled words.<\/p>\n

Cover us with your big wings, vigil-keeping evening cloud.<\/p>\n

War Diary<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

1. Monday Evening<\/p>\n

You see, now fear often fingers your heart,
\nand at times the world seems only distant news;
\nthe old trees guard your childhood for you
\nas an ever more ancient memory.<\/p>\n

Between suspicious mornings and foreboding nights
\nyou have lived half your life among wars,
\nand now once more, order is glinting toward you
\non the raised points of bayonets.<\/p>\n

In dreams sometimes the landscape still rises before you,
\nthe home of your poetry, where the scent of freedom
\nwafts over the meadows, and in the morning when you wake,
\nyou carry the scent with you.<\/p>\n

Rarely, when you are working, you half-sit, frightened
\nat your desk. And it’s as if you were living in soft mud;
\nyour hand, adorned with a pen, moves heavily
\nand ever more gravely.<\/p>\n

The world is turning into another war\u2014a hungry cloud
\ngobbles the sky’s mild blue, and as it darkens,
\nyour young wife puts her arms around you,
\nand weeps.<\/p>\n

2. Tuesday Evening<\/p>\n

Now I sleep peacefully
\nand slowly go about my work\u2014
\ngas, airplanes, bombs are poised against me,
\nI can neither be afraid, nor cry;
\nso I live hard, like the road builders
\namong the cold mountains,<\/p>\n

who, if their flimsy house
\ncrumbles over them with age,
\nput up a new one, and meanwhile
\nsleep deeply on fragrant wood shavings,
\nand in the morning, splash their faces
\nin the cold and shining streams.<\/p>\n

I live high up, and peer around:
\nit is getting darker.
\nAs when from a ship’s prow
\nat the flash of lightning
\nthe watchman cries out, thinking he sees land,
\nso I believe in the land also\u2014and still I cry out life!
\nwith a whitened voice.<\/p>\n

And the sound of my voice brightens
\nand is carried far away
\nwith a cool star and a cool evening wind.<\/p>\n

3. Weary Afternoon<\/p>\n

A dying wasp flies in at the window,
\nmy dreaming wife talks in her sleep,
\nand the hems of the browning clouds
\nare blown to fringes by a gentle breeze.<\/p>\n

What can I talk about? Winter is coming, and war is coming;
\nsoon I will lie broken, seen by no one;
\nworm-ridden earth will fill my mouth and eyes
\nand roots will pierce through my body.<\/p>\n

Oh, gently rocking afternoon, give me peace\u2014
\nI will lie down too, and work later.
\nThe light of your sun is already hanging on the hedges,
\nand yonder the evening comes across the hills.<\/p>\n

They have killed a cloud, its blood is falling on the sky;
\nbelow, on the stems of the glowing leaves
\nsit wine-scented yellow berries.<\/p>\n

4. Evening Approaches<\/p>\n

Across the slick sky the sun is climbing down,
\nand the evening is coming early along the road.
\nIts coming is watched in vain by the sharp-eyed moon\u2014
\nlittle puffs of mist are gathering.<\/p>\n

The hedgerow is wakening, it catches at a weary wanderer;
\nthe evening is spinning among the tree branches
\nand humming louder and louder, while these lines build up
\nand lean on one another.<\/p>\n

A frightened squirrel springs into my quiet room,
\nand here a six-footed iambic couplet scampers by.
\nFrom the wall to the window, a brown moment\u2014
\nand it’s gone without a trace.<\/p>\n

The fleeting peace disappears with it. Silent
\nworms crawl over the far fields
\nand slowly chew to pieces the endless
\nrows of the reclining dead.<\/p>\n

“Mikl\u00f3s Radn\u00f3ti [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, Pog\u00e1ny k\u00f6sz\u00f6nto<\/i> (Pagan Salute). His next book, \u00dajm\u00f3di p\u00e1sztorok \u00e9neke <\/i>(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 J\u00e1rk\u00e1lj csa, hal\u00e1lra\u00edt\u00e9lt!<\/i> (Walk On, Condemned!) won the prestigious Baumgarten Prize in 1937. Also in 1937 he wrote his Cartes Postales<\/i> (Postcards from France), which were precurors to his darker images of war, Razglednicas<\/i> (Picture Postcards). During World War II, Radn\u00f3ti published translations of Virgil, Rimbaud, Mallarm\u00e9, Eluard, Apollinare and Blaise Cendras in Orpheus nyom\u00e1ban<\/i>. 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, Radn\u00f3ti recorded poetic images of what he saw and experienced. After writing his fourth and final “Postcard,” Radn\u00f3ti 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 Radn\u00f3ti’s poems were found on his body by his wife, inscribed in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book. Radn\u00f3ti’s posthumous collection, Tajt\u00e9kos \u00e9g <\/i>(Clouded Sky, or Foaming Sky) contains odes to his wife, letters, poetic fragments and his final Postcards.”<\/p>\n

And so will I wonder…?<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

Mikl\u00f3s Radn\u00f3ti<\/p>\n

I lived, but then in living I was feeble in life and
\nalways knew that they would bury me here in the end,
\nthat year piles upon year, clod on clod, stone on stone,
\nthat the body swells and in the cool, maggot-
\ninfested darkness, the naked bone will shiver.
\nThat above, scuttling time is rummaging through my poems
\nand that I will sink deeper into the ground.
\nAll this I knew. But tell me, the work\u2014did that live on?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas\/\/Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
\n27\/\/4
\nQuietly situated beneath the slanting gray steles of the memorial, is a small but …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":892,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[],"tags":[],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/892"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}