Proud-pied April: Nothing matters in hiding

This year marks the 60^th anniversary of the Hungarian revolt against its Communist government (and Soviet overlords). What started as a student march on the Parliament building in Budapest on 23 October looked for a few days as though it would crack open the Warsaw Pact. But within a couple of weeks the Red Army invaded and even more repressive measures were imposed on the country, symbolized in such photos as this one:

Hungary’s in one of those dicey geopolitical situations, standing in the path between Russian and German interests. During the Second World War the country was an Axis ally, and engaged in some unsuccessful secret attempts to negotiate an armistice with the Western Allies while fighting off the Soviets, which resulted in a German invasion in March, 1944. Between then and Germany’s surrender in April, 1945, 450,000 Jews and 28,000 Roma were murdered; there was almost no Hungarian resistance to this policy of deportation and murder.

One of the victims was the poet Miklós Radnóti. During the war Radnóti was conscripted into the Hungarian army; being a Jew, he was assigned to an unarmed labor battalion on the eastern front. He continued to write poetry, which we know about because, as the end approached, he bribed one of his Hungarian guards to smuggle his notebook of poems out. In November 1944, on a forced march, Radnóti was killed, with about 3200 comrades.

Like poets everywhere, Radnóti wrote about the human experience. In his case, of course, that experience included imprisonment and the expectation of being murdered. For example:

“The Hunted”

From my window I see a hillside,

  it cannot see me at all;

I’m still, verse trickles from my pen

  but nothing matters in hiding;

I see, though cannot grasp this solemn,

  old-fashioned grace: as ever,

the moon emerges onto the sky and

  the cherry tree bursts into blossom.

Since the end of the war, Radnóti has been recognized as a national treasure in Hungary. Funny how that works out.