Craft: Miklós Radnóti

Miklós Radnóti (b. Miklós Glatter, 1909-1944) was a Jewish-Hungarian poet born in Radnóti, a part of Hungary that is today in Slovakia and known as Radnovce. He was born in Budapest. His father, Jakab Glatter, worked at a wholesale textile company owned by a brother-in-law, Dezsó Grósz. Radnóti’s mother, Ilona Grosz, and twin brother died at his birth. His father then remarried a woman named Ilona Molnár in 1911 and they had a daughter, Ágnes, in 1914. He didn’t know that Molnár was not his mother until July 1921 when he was 12 and his father died suddenly of a stroke. Then he went to live with relatives who told him the truth.

Both Ilona and Ágnes Molnár were killed in Auschwitz in 1944. There is very little data about Radnóti’s early life, but the death of his mother and brother appear in much of his early poetry.

Radnóti graduated from the University of Szeged, then went to Budapest to teach, but could not get any teaching positions because he was a Jew. He instead supported himself by translating Hungarian and French. His first book, Pogány köszöntó [Pagan Salute] was published in 1930.

When World War II began, he was conscripted into forced labor three times. Jews were not allowed to carry firearms and were thus prohibited from serving in the Hungarian army in combat. Beginning in July 1942 he was forced to wear a yellow armband marking him as a Jew. After his final call to forced labor service, he was taken to a town called Bor, Serbia with 6,000 other Jews to work in a copper mine to support the German war effort.

“Poet: If I live. And if anyone’s there still to read it.”