In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklos Radnoti (review)

Hungary capped its long history of anti-Semitism by collaborating with Germany and deporting, in the span of two months (May 15 to July 10, 1944), nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews, primarily to Auschwitz. The deportation left "the Hungarian countryside . . . judenrein." By the time the war was over, 70 percent of Hungary's Jews had been murdered. Against this background, Ozsváth traces the life of Miklós Radnóti (1901–44): his words, "But tell me—did [my] work survive?" can be answered with a simple, firm "yes." Radnóti believed, against all reason, that he would "earn acclaim as a national poet." He did so, but posthumously. He wrote exquisite poems about love, nature, politics, and finally the pain of forced labor and war. His final notebook of poems, secured in the pocket of his raincoat, was found in a mass grave two years after the Germans shot him during a death march. All literature of and on the Holocaust is disturbing, but this book is especially so: the stench of mass murder is made sharp and inescapable by attending to the destruction of one man and his art.