Miklós Radnóti

Miklós Radnóti (born Miklós Glatter, surname variants: Radnói, Radnóczi; 5 May 1909 – 4 or 9 November 1944) was a Hungarian poet, an outstanding representative of modern Hungarian lyric poetry as well as a certified secondary school teacher of Hungarian and French. He is characterised by his striving for pure genre and his revival of traditional, tried and tested genres.

Biography
Miklós Glatter descended from a long line of Hungarian Jewish village merchants, peddlers, and pub keepers in Radnót, in what is now Slovakia.

At the time of his birth, Miklós Glatter's father, Jakab Glatter, worked as a travelling salesman for the Brück & Grosz textile company, which was owned by his brother in law. He was born in the 13th district (Újlipótváros quarter) of Budapest, the capital city of the Kingdom of Hungary. At birth, his twin brother was born dead and his mother, Ilona Grosz, died soon after childbirth. His father remarried in 1911 with Ilona Molnár (1885–1944). In 1921 his father died of stroke, his guardian became his aunt's husband, Dezső Grosz, who was one of the owners of the textile company his father worked for until his death.

Radnóti attended primary and secondary school in his place of birth and continued his education at the high school for textile industry in Liberec from 1927–28 on his uncle's advice. Then he worked as commercial correspondent in the familiar textile business company until 1930. Ultimately, Radnóti was able to prevail with desire for another education and began studying philosophy, Hungarian and French at the University of Szeged.

In 1934, he finished his studies with the philosophical doctoral thesis The artistic development of Margit Kaffka. After graduation, he Magyarised his surname to Radnóti, after the native village of his paternal ancestors. In August 1935, he married his long-standing love Fanny Gyarmati (1912–2014), daughter of the owner of the respected Gyarmati printing house. The very happy marriage was unfortunately childless until his deportation. He gained his first professional experiences as secondary school teacher in the 1935-36 academic year at the Zsigmond Kemény Gymnasium in Budapest.

In September 1940, he was conscripted to a labor battalion (a kind of unarmed military service, initially for those unfit for armed service, but increasingly, as the world war progressed, a punishment for citizens considered untrustworthy like leftists, dissidents, Jews) of the Royal Hungarian Army until December of that year, then from July 1942 to April 1943 for the second time. On 2 May 1943, he converted together with his wife from Judaism to the Roman Catholic faith. In May 1944, Radnóti's third military labor service started and his battalion was deployed to the copper mines of Bor in Serbia. After 1943, Hungarian Jewish forced laborers working in Bor's copper mines contributed to 50 percent of the copper used by the German war industry. The overseers of the forced laborers of Bor were particularly notorious for their cruelty.

On 17 September 1944, the battalion was commanded to leave the camp on foot in two groups in a forced march to flee the advancing Allied armies. Radnóti was in the first group (about 3600 forced laborers), around half of the group perished. The overseers of the second group were ambushed by Yugoslav partisans before departure and all forced laborers survived. Radnóti endured inhuman conditions while being forced to walk from Bor to Szentkirályszabadja, where he wrote his last poem on 31 October.

Murder and its aftermath
In November 1944, because of their total physical and mental exhaustion, Radnóti and twenty other prisoners were fatally shot and buried in a mass grave near the dam at Abda, by a guard squad of a commander and four soldiers of the Royal Hungarian Army. Different dates of this mass murder have been given. Some publications specify a day in the period from 6 to 10 November. In the detailed and scientific exhibition of 2009 by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 4 November was claimed to be the date of death.

On 19 June 1946, the mass grave in Abda was exhumed, and personal documents, letters and photographs were found. On 25 June 1946, Radnóti was reburied in the Jewish cemetery of Győr, together with twenty-one other victims.

On 12 August 1946, his widow, Fanni Gyarmati went to Győr with Gyula Ortutay, Gábor Tolnai and Dezső Baróti to identify the body of her husband that was exhumed for the second time. In his work titled Ecce homo (Canadian Hungarian Newspaper, 2011), Tamás Szemenyei-Kiss describes how at the time of the second exhumation in Győr, Fanni Gyarmati had not seen her husband and was shown several objects that had never belonged to Radnóti. Therefore, at the time of the third burial, she was no longer sure that the closed coffin really contained her husband's remains. Miklós Radnóti's third funeral service in Budapest was held in public on 14 August 1946. The Tridentine Requiem Mass was offered by Radnóti's former spiritual director, Fr. Sándor Sík. Gyula Ortutay gave a eulogy on behalf of his friends. Radnóti was laid to rest in the Fiume Road Graveyard in Budapest, in plot 41, grave number 41.

The commander of the guards involved in the mass murder, Sgt. András Tálas, immediately joined the Communist Party of Hungary after the end of the Second World War, but he was arrested as part of a Stalinist political purge on 7 August 1945. He was tried and convicted by a post-war People's Court for his cruelty towards the slave labourers at the Bor concentration camp, and executed in 27 February 1947. Neither Radnóti's name nor the mass murder of Jewish prisoners near Abda, however, were mentioned in the voluminous prosecution file or during the trial. The other murderers' names remained unknown to the Hungarian people until 2006. There was a strictly confidential investigation conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs III during the communist era between 1967–1977, which identified four Royal Hungarian Army soldiers under of the command of Sgt. Tálas who were involved in the murder: Sándor Bodor, István Reszegi (or Reszegh; who both became long-time members in good standing of the ruling Hungarian Communist Party), as well as Sándor Kunos and János Malakuczi. No one else was ever indicted or prosecuted by the Communist single-party state. Sándor Kunos and János Malakuczi, however, who were not Party members, remained under covert surveillance by the Hungarian secret police (ÁVO).

Bibliography (selection)

 * Pogány köszöntő (Pagan Greeting), Kortárs, Budapest 1930.
 * Újmódi pásztorok éneke (Songs of Modern Shepherds), Fiatal Magyarország, Budapest 1931.
 * Lábadozó szél (Convalescent Wind), Fiatalok Művészeti Kollégiumának kiadása, Szeged 1933.
 * Újhold (New Moon), Fiatalok Művészeti Kollégiumának kiadása, Szeged 1935.
 * Járkálj csak, halálraítélt! (Just Walk Around, Condemned!), Nyugat Kiadása, Budapest 1936.
 * Meredek út (Steep Road), Cserépfalvi, Budapest 1938.
 * Naptár (Calendar), Hungária, Budapest 1942.
 * Orpheus nyomában : műfordítások kétezer év költőiből (In the Footsteps of Orpheus: Translations of Poetry of Two Thousand Year Old Poets), Pharos, Budapest 1943.
 * Tajtékos ég (Foamy Sky), Révai, Budapest 1946.
 * Radnóti Miklós művei (Works of Miklós Radnóti), Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, Budapest 1978, ISBN 963-15-1182-0, biography by
 * Miklós Radnóti, The Complete Poetry in Hungarian and English, McFarland & Company, Jefferson 2014, ISBN 978-0-78646953-6

Miklós Radnóti was Hungarian translator of works by Jean de La Fontaine and Guillaume Apollinaire. His works were translated into English by Edward G. Emery and Frederick Turner, into Serbo-Croatian by Danilo Kiš, into German by Franz Fühmann and into French by.

Reviews

 * Findlay, Bill (1980), review of Forced March, in Cencrastus No. 2, Spring 1980, pp. 45 & 46,

Articles

 * History of the Jews in Hungary
 * Hungary during World War II
 * The Holocaust