Réka

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A poem by my favourite Hugarian poet who fell victim to the Holocaust;

How Others See
by Miklós Radnóti
"How others see this region, I cannot understand: to me, this little country is menaced motherland with flames around, the world of my childhood swaying far, and I am grown from this land as tender branches are from trees. And may my body sink into this soil in the end. When plants reach out towards me, I greet them as a friend and know their names and flowers. I am at home here, knowing the people on the road and why and where they are going- and how I know the meaning when by a summer lane the sunset paints the walls with a liquid flame of pain! The pilot can’t help seeing a war map from the sky, can’t tell below the home of Vörösmarty Mihály; what can he identify there? grim barracks and factories, but I see steeples,oxen, farms, grasshoppers and bees; his lens spies out the vital production plants, the fields, but I can see the worker, afraid below, who shields his labour, a singing orchard, a vinyard and a wood, among the graves a granny mourning her widowhood..."
17 January, 1944

In 1944 Radnóti was sent to a labor camp near Bor in Yugoslavia. As the Russian army was approaching, the concentration camps in Yugoslavia were evacuated and his unit was led on foot through Hungary. Radnóti was shot death by Hungarian guards in November near the village of Abda, with other 21 internees who were unable to walk. The mass grave was exhumed after the war and Radnóti's last poems, describing incidents on the march, were found in his trench coat pocket.