Poems for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Auschwitz - Camp after liberation (www.auschwitz.org)



27 January is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is 70 years today since the liberation of Auschwitz.

Commemoration events planned this year are particularly extensive, as 70 years is one of the last major anniversaries when a significant number of survivors may still be alive. I think that this may also be considered a potentially dangerous tipping point, when the events of the war become a really distant memory and newer generations may be less and less interested or aware. World events would seem to indicate that in some respects the tipping point has already been reached.

I just wanted to share a few poems and past blog posts which tie into International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

Two poets particularly close to my heart are Paul Celan and Miklós Radnóti. Paul Celan, a German-speaking Jew from Bukovina, lost his parents in the Holocaust and was also interned in a labour camp. He died by suicide in 1970, never able to leave the trauma of his experiences behind. I wrote about Celan's poem 'With a Variable Key', and some reflections on my visit to Auschwitz, here.

Miklós Radnóti was a Hungarian Jew who died on a forced march in 1944. I wrote here about his life and his beautiful poem 'Letter to my wife', published after his death.

Szilárd Borbély, a Hungarian poet who died in 2014, was also the author of The Dispossessed. I was thinking of his poem 'The Matyó Embroidery'. This is a very powerful and distressing poem. The first time I read it, I must say that I started to feel a sense of panic about halfway through when I realised where it was going. I suppose that it should have been obvious where it was going, but the poem's carefully constructed narrative shape makes the whole experience of reading it especially overwhelming.

Finally, Geoffrey Hill's 'September Song' is a short and very sad poem about a child victim of the Holocaust.

Echoes: Lawrence Durrell's 'Sarajevo'

Sarajevo by Lazhar Neftien. Used under Creative Commons license



After I wrote about Miklós Radnóti and 'Letter to my wife' a couple of months ago, I thought of the poem 'Sarajevo' by Lawrence Durrell, and kept thinking about it for several days at least. Then I forgot to write about it, but tonight it came back to me.


SARAJEVO (Lawrence Durrell)


This was one of my "these poems feel linked, but I'm not sure why" moments. There seem to be echoes between the poems, anyway. Most obviously, it could be the Balkan settings; the war settings, whether death march, or start of war, or aftermath. There is something in the opening lines of both poems that is both soaring and tragically grounded, too: "the mountain roads/Earthbound..." and the distances that just can't be crossed in Radnóti's 'Letter to my wife'.

In any case, that "echo of a pistol-shot" went around the world one hundred years ago and it is still echoing.

Miklós Radnóti: 'Letter To My Wife' - Poetry of Witness From the Grave

The poetry of Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) is so beautiful, so pure and devastating, that it could take the breath from your lungs or break your heart. The poems and the story behind them are, in terms of "poetry of witness", the ultimate voice of the voiceless and murdered, crying from the ground.

He was a Hungarian Jewish poet who during his life struggled against the obstacles placed in his way due to his ethnic background. Radnóti worked as a translator and tutor, and wrote poetry which received little attention in his lifetime. His passion for his wife Fanni is evident from his poems. In 1943 he converted to Catholicism, but this of course made no difference to how he was viewed as a Jew.

Radnóti was made to serve hard labour in the 1940s, until he was eventually shot on a forced march, already in a weakened condition. After the war, his body and those of others were exhumed from a mass grave. In his overcoat, there was a small notebook which contained his final poems. They are now considered some of the finest Hungarian poetry, and world poetry, ever written. Only someone quite remarkable, both in talent and in spirit, could have written such poems in very extreme circumstances, knowing that he was probably facing death.

It is a good time to read Radnóti's poems, if "good" is the right word. In the past ten days or so, a photo appeared on the internet which showed his poems being burned by neo-fascist extremists in Hungary. A statue commemorating the place of his death was also driven into and destroyed. The latter incident may have been an accident, though the circumstances are unclear, but the book-burning certainly wasn't.

I think it's important for these incidents not to go unnoticed, and such happenings in Hungary and elsewhere are not receiving a great deal of media attention. You can read other articles at Melville House and at The Missing Slate. I first heard about this from Hungarian-born British poet and translator George Szirtes, whose excellent blog often draws attention to Hungarian issues.

Here, finally, is one of the poems, 'Letter to my wife' - one of those final poems and beloved by many. It is impossible to read this without being deeply moved. It is incredible on a purely aesthetic basis, as poetry, and it is a testimony which should be listened to.


LETTER TO MY WIFE (Miklós Radnóti, translated by Stephen Capus)