The Poem as Primary Document Miklós Radnóti and the Poetics of Witness

Most successful poems derive their power from the space in front of them. They create a gap between the right now and next time, imbuing the poem with a sense of the future. Without that space, a poem obscures the pure realm of the possible (or, if you prefer, Keats’s negative capability). When you read and reread such a poem, and it won’t stick, this is why: you are alienated by the poem’s frozen interiority. A lot of poems are like this.

But every so often you discover a poem that defies this logic and thrives by turning in on itself. Two poems by the Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti exemplify this rare poetic phenomenon well. Radnóti wrote the first one on October 6, 1944:

Five miles away the hayricks and houses

are going up in fire;

beside the fields, peasants smoke their pipes

in silence and in fear.

Here, the lake still ripples at the little

shepherdesses’ stride;

on the water a ruffled flock of sheep

stoops to drink a cloud.

Everything here ends as it begins. Geographical distance—those five miles—is immediately consumed by fire that also silences the peasants who smoke and huddle in a daze. The violence of this erasure even touches the pastoral idyll of a shepherd girl wading into the water, her sheep swallowing a cloud as if to drown it. Fire and water extinguish each other—and innocence—in eight lines.

The second poem, written on October 24 of the same year, smothers the future in a more direct way. Doom descends—on animals, people, a squadron—like a fog of pesticide on vermin. That momentarily safe nook for the wading flock is gone, and all that remains is death:

The bullocks’ mouths are drooling bloody spittle,

all the men are pissing blood,

our squadron stands in rough and stinking clumps,

a foul death blows overhead.

I note the dates of these poems for a reason. As a Jew, Radnóti was condemned to Hungarian work camps in 1941. He wrote the above two poems—and eight others—while enduring a forced march led by Hungarian sergeants towards Germany. He was executed—one shot to the head—on November 8 or 9, 1944. When his mass grave was exhumed eighteen months later, ten poems (the last five being called “Postcards”) were found in the pocket of his trench coat. The suffocation evident in these poems is more than autobiography. It’s history.

Indeed, the total lack of futurity in Radnóti’s postcard poems enables them to do something that poems are rarely able to do: serve as witness to the past. W. H. Auden famously noted that “poetry makes nothing happen.” But Radnóti’s “literature of evidence” suggests otherwise. With contemporary Holocaust denialism on the rise, the poem as primary document may have the potential to do more than ever.

………….

Holocaust denialism has recently thrived in the dark corners of the internet. Most of its revisionism is rooted in absurd pseudo-scientific assertions: Zyklon B gas could not kill humans, gas chambers were really delousing facilities, postwar confessions were forced, or Jews were killed by Typhus. Beyond these fraudulent claims, however, there’s a larger and more insidious stratagem that, rather than lurking in digital darkness, is becoming alarmingly and openly endemic to much of political life today: a rejection of expertise.

The Holocaust is possibly the most well-documented and thoroughly analyzed tragedy in human history. Professional historians have pioneered an intricate and deeply established Holocaust historiography rooted in the field’s most objective methodologies. Finding a professionally-trained historian who denies the Holocaust is about as likely as finding an infectious disease doctor who denies the effectiveness of vaccines. As recently as May 2025, an academic review articulated the consensus that, “the Holocaust was a continent-wide crime committed by willing participants everywhere.” No real historian would disagree.

Ironically, though, this widespread agreement among the educated elite is precisely what makes the Holocaust a ripe target for conspiratorial revisionism. As with vaccines, people who resist the dominant narrative succumb to an emotional logic that goes something like this: the satisfying impulse to think against the grain overrides the responsibility to obey the top-down directives of those who are better educated and more knowledgeable than we are.

This conspiratorial denial of expertise—be it for vaccines or the Holocaust or 9/11—by its nature feeds on rogue interpretations. The podcaster in the basement, armed with “alternative facts,” holds more power for those who deny mainstream consensus because, due to their outsider perspective, they appease the anger that structurally weak people often experience as a result of their marginalized status.

There is, in essence, something deeply healing in a conspiracy for those who need it. Anyone in on a conspiracy is in on a secret, often an empowering one so exclusive even the experts are, so the conspiracists think, unaware of it. Thus, to reach a Holocaust denier with a new message, a more accurate message, you must also in some critical way deny the obvious contours of consensus reality.

…………..

And isn’t that what a poet does best? Make you see the world right under your nose from a unique perspective? Radnóti’s poetry—because it is not a formal history, because it is the idiosyncratic poetic expression of a subjective outsider—could potentially have a lot to say to a Holocaust denier, if only because it was adept, according to Radnóti’s leading scholar, Gyozo Ferencz, at “subverting common sense” with the truth.

Radnóti knew marginalization. His Jewish heritage excluded him from the elite university he was more than academically qualified to attend. Antisemitic laws and customs prevented him from ever obtaining a job as a teacher or editor. His first book, “Song of Modern Shepherds,” was deemed by Hungarian officials an “offense against decency.” Despite getting a PhD (albeit from a lesser university than the one he should have attended), Radnóti’s working life was reduced to manual labor—namely, digging holes for telephone poles. Understandably, he was resentful and angry. But rather than reach for conspiracies, he found solace in the hard truth of his poems.

Consider his final poem, written on October 31, 1944, after he watched his friend get executed:

I tumbled beside him, his body twisted and then,

like a snapped string, up it sprang again.

Neck shot. “This is how you will be going too,”

I whispered to myself, “just lie easy now.”

Patience is blossoming into death.

“Der springt noch auf,” rang out above me. Mud

dried on my ear, mingled with blood.

A week later he too was dead. Notably, the closer he came to what he understood to be his inevitable demise, the calmer and more focused his lyrical voice became. All the space he once left in front of his earlier poems—“I’ve been planning to tell you / about the secret galaxy of my love for so long–/ in just one image, just the essence”—now collapsed into an immediate poetic resignation to his fate in the moment.

That moment for Radnóti was both searingly personal, deeply historical, and unequivocally unjust. Far be it for me to know if there’s a Venn diagram overlap for Holocaust deniers and readers of poetry. I tend to doubt it. But a poem thriving equally as both poem and primary document is not only rare, but in the case of Radnóti, whose postcards are nothing short of poetic witness, an unexpected and renegade way to see the tragedy of an historical reality. It’s history for those who distrust historians, a Trojan Horse harboring the truth of tragedy for those who need it the most.