One of Hungary’s greatest poets was executed by Hungarian soldiers on the western border on 9 November 1944.

Radnóti was born in Budapest in 1909. His mother died in childbirth, his father died when Miklós was 11. The orphan was raised and educated by his uncle. With a degree from a trade school, he joined his tutor's company, but his only real interest was poetry. From 1930 he studied Hungarian and French at the University of Szeged. He incurred the wrath of the authorities with a poem in his first volume: he was tried for blasphemy. He avoided prison only through the intercession of his influential teacher and patron, Sándor Sík, but he was not allowed to become a teacher. After graduating from university, he took up a career as a poet and literary translator. 

In the increasingly oppressive, antisemiticatmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Radnóti - like his fellow outcasts - tried to preserve his dignity, his chosen vocation: he created, wrote, translated. He refused to accept the stigma. “I have never denied my Jewishness, I am still a 'Jew' ...”, he wrote in 1942, “but I do not feel Jewish, I was not brought up to the religion, I do not need it, I do not practise it, I consider the race, the blood clot, the ancient sorrow for the roots of the soil that quivers in the nerves, to be nonsense and not the defining feature of my 'spirituality' and 'poetry' ...My Jewishness is my 'problem of life' because it is made so by circumstances, by laws, by the world. A problem of necessity. Otherwise, I am a Hungarian poet,...and I don't care... what the prime minister of the day thinks about it...They can disown me, they can accept me, my 'nation' doesn't shout from the bookshelf that I am a stinking Jew, the landscapes of my homeland open up before me, the bush doesn't tear at me more than at others, the tree doesn't prance so that I can't reach its fruit. If I were to experience such things, I would kill myself, for I cannot live any other way than I live, nor believe any other way, nor think any other way.”

From 1940, he was called up several times for labor service. In 1943 he converted to Catholicism, but was still considered a Jew under the antisemitic Jewish laws. In April 1944, his poems were banned along with the works of other Jewish or classified authors, and his volumes were confiscated. In the summer of 1944, he was again called up, this time to the copper mines of Bor in Serbia. The days of forced labor were hard and the conditions were harsh, but in the so-called Heidenau camp there was no immediate threat to the prisoners' lives. The poet was sustained by the hope of returning home to his wife and a small, checkered notebook. At night, he would jot down lines of poetry in it with a stub of a pencil.

The mines of Bor began to be emptied in August 1944 by the retreating Germans. Radnóti was sent to the central (Berlin) camp. In the camp, under the command of the sadistic Lieutenant Colonel Ede Marányi, beatings and punishments were frequent. Executions also occurred. The camp was evacuated in two groups. The poet was placed in the second group, but he gave credence to rumors that those who remained in the camp were to be executed. He therefore managed to leave the camp with the first group on 17 September. The second stage was liberated shortly afterwards by Yugoslav partisans. 

The first group of the Bor labor servicemen were driventowards Hungary in a foot march. The prisoners were beaten and many were shot. "Fool, who, falling to the ground, rises and walks again,/ and moves his ankles and knees like wandering pain", Radnóti wrote in his notebook, which he still has with him. On the night of 7 October, SS troops shot dead hundreds of labor servicemen at Crvenka, Serbia. Radnóti was not among them, and he escaped death in the subsequent massacre in Sivac. His comrade, the violinist Miklós Lorsi, was executed here. Radnóti’s last poem was probably inspired by this: “I fell next to him, his body flipped over/and it was tense like a string ready to bust./A shot in the head. – That’s your end too –/I whispered to myself, - just lay in the dust./Patience blossoms death now./Then I overhear: “Der Springt noch auf” – a voice over me./ Mud mixed with blood dried up on my ear.”The poem proved prophetic. On reaching the western border of Hungary, the poet struggled with exhaustion. After a hospital in Győr refused to admit him and some of his companions, he was executed by his guards at Abda on 9 November. The booklet was found after the war, during the exhumation of the victims.