Disturbing, Distant, Muffled Sounds by Miklós Radnóti

Translated from the Hungarian & Edited
by Thomas Ország-Land (May 2016)
 

THE HOLOCAUST did not begin with the gas chambers; and some people who cared or dared to look discerned quite early the direction of the unfolding tragedy. The poem below, dated June 8 1940, mourns the WW2 dismemberment of Poland that was followed shortly by the “resettlement” and murder of up to 18,000 Hungarian Jews in Galicia/Ukraine. Its author entered the storm deliberately with notebook in hand to record the brutality and chaos of the Holocaust in orderly classical metre.  more>>>