DIRECTOR'S
STATEMENT
Hugo Perez,
Director/Producer:
What first struck me about Miklos Radnoti’s work is
that he continued to write poetry under dark, humiliating,
and ultimately fatal circumstances. In a labor camp in
Serbia, after a full day of backbreaking slave labor, he
would manage somehow to find the energy to work on a few
lines of poetry. During a three month long forced march
when people beside him were dying of exhaustion and being
shot to death, he somehow managed to focus on finding words
that bore witness to his experience. From the late thirties
on, he had lived with the feeling that he would die a
lonely death, a victim of the rising tide of anti-semitism
and fascism. Instead of giving in to despair, he chose to
give himself up wholeheartedly to his poetry, leaving
behind a remarkable body of work documenting his life in
the increasingly dark years of 1938 to 1944. In the final
weeks of his life, when he must have known he would die
soon and that there was very little chance that anyone
would ever read his final poems, he continued to write with
the conviction that somehow even if he did not survive, his
poems would. His life and work are a testament to an artist
who overcame the inhumanity of his age through his art.
The other remarkable thing to me about the work of Radnoti
was how scarily contemporary it felt despite having been
written in 1944 during the Holocaust. In the poem
‘Peace, Dread’ (1938), he describes the feeling
of walking out of his house and observing his neighbors
going about their normal business oblivious to the dark
clouds of the cataclysm that he sees will soon befall them.
It is a feeling that strikes a chord with me at a time when
it seems as if most people around me are blind,
intentionally or not, to the serious issues and challenges
that the world today faces.
As much as
Radnoti seems to say with his poem that if you do nothing
else open your eyes and really look at the world around
you, I hope that my film NEITHER MEMORY NOR MAGIC will make
people realize that the Holocaust in 1944 was not an
isolated moment in history unconnected from our present.
Genocides, war, and general inhumanity continually plague
our world and if we are to do anything about them we first
have to acknowledge that they are happening before our
eyes.