헝가리 문학에 나타난 유태인 대학살

The Holocaust in the Hungarian literature - Miklos Radnoti's Razglednicas and his struggle for humanity -

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were “life unworthy of life.” By 1945, close to two out of every three European Jews had been killed. Large-scale deportation and murder of the Jews also took place in Hungary. Previous to this, the Hungarian Jews had been called up for military service, and were sent to the Eastern Front as ‘auxiliary forces’ ; but in fact, they were used for forced labour in inhuman conditions, digging trenches for the regular troops or assisting them in the maintenance of the supply routes to and from the front line. Finally most of them were shot to death. Of poets who fell victim to the persecution of Hungarian Jewry, Miklos Radnoti(1909-44) should be mentioned. From the year of 1940, he was intermittently the inmate of labour camps. When in May 1944, he is called up again, he knows that this is his last encounter in a losing battle with death. He is strangely composed, and accepts the situation with the dignity of a martyr who goes to the stake because he has no alternative but to join the ranks of those who perished before him. The long column of inmates of the forced labour camp set out on 17 September towards its destiny; as the Russian army closed in on the Germans in the Balkans, the concentration camps in Yugoslavia were evacuated, and their personnel sent to Germany in a forced march. Radnoti entrusted copies of his poems to friends; he knew now that his life did not matter, but the records had to be preserved. Radnoti marched as far as Abda, a small village near Gyor, in Hungary, where he was executed on 9 November, together with dozens of other internees who were unable to walk on. The mass grave was exhumed after the war, and in the pocket of Radnoti's trench coat a notebook was found containing his last, hitherto unknown poems. Of these, the Razglednicas four in number, are of special interest. The short masterpieces, describing incidents in the death march, showed us the very vivid situation of the Holocaust and the destruction of the humanity. Among his fellows, intent on avoiding being shot, Radnoti can yet rise to the heights of the “poet” as he writes with the stub of a pencil, “in half-dark blindly, in earthworm-rhythm...inching along on the paper”, in his tiny notebook-writing perfect poetry. This poetry is one of the peaks of antifascist verse. He was not a prolific writer, but what he wrote remains a part of the glory of Hungarian literature.