Miklós Radnóti

Origins and early life

Miklós Radnóti was born in Budapest on 5 May 1909 as Miklós Glatter, to Jewish parents; his mother and twin brother died at his birth, a loss he wrote about all his life, and his father died when he was twelve.

Work and career

He was raised a Jew and this fiche states plainly that in 1943, a year before his death, he was formally baptized a Catholic — a conversion of conviction, made under the shadow of the racial laws, which changed nothing at all in the eyes of the Hungarian state, since those laws defined him by descent and not by belief. He studied Hungarian and French at Szeged, published his first collection at twenty-one, was prosecuted for one of his early books, and became by the late 1930s one of the finest poets writing in Hungarian, master of a classical eclogue form into which he poured the fear of the coming catastrophe.

From 1940 he was conscripted repeatedly into the Jewish forced-labour battalions, and in May 1944 was sent to the copper mines of Bor in occupied Serbia. As the front advanced, the prisoners were marched back toward Hungary on foot; Radnóti kept writing in a small notebook in his coat pocket, addressing his wife Fanni. On 9 November 1944, near Abda, unable to walk further, he was shot with twenty-one others by the guards and buried in a mass grave.

Eighteen months later the grave was opened; in the coat pocket of the body identified as his was the notebook, stained but legible, containing the last poems, among them the Razglednicas, four postcards from the march. They were published in 1946 as Tajtékos ég. He was thirty-five.