Location: Kerepesi temető / Kerepesi Cemetery, Budapest, Hungary
Cause of death: Executed
Photos taken by: misibacsi
Buy books by Miklós Radnóti
Hungarian poet who died during the Holocaust. In the early 1940s Radnóti was conscripted by the Hungarian Army, but as a Jew by birth he was assigned to an unarmed labour battalion. The battalion was assigned to the Ukrainian front, and then in May 1944 the Hungarian Army retreated and his battalion was transferred to the copper mines in Bor, Serbia. In August 1944 Radnóti's group of 3,200 Hungarian Jews was force-marched to central Hungary. On the march Radnóti, together with other Jews, was shot, and buried in a mass grave.
Eighteen months after his death, the mass grave was exhumed and in the front pocket of Radnóti's overcoat his small notebook of final poems was found. These poems serve as one of the most chilling pieces of Holocaust literature. From the touching love poems written to a wife he would never see again to the gruesomely accurate descriptions of Nazi barbarism, Radnoti's words help convey the thoughts and emotions of a man facing one of history's greatest evils. Today, a statue next to the road commemorates his place of death. Radnóti's body was later re-interred in Budapest's Kerepesi Cemetery.
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