Neither Memory Nor Magic
The Life
and Times of Miklos Radnoti
A
Documentary Produced and Directed by Hugo Perez
Executive Produced by Greg Carr and Noble Smith
in collaboration with the Carr Foundation
Miklos Radnoti
From Dawn Until Midnight (1938)
I lived but, always being unskilled in life, I knew
Right from the start that in the end they’d bury me
–
That year silted on year, clod followed clod, stone stone,
And that, down there, the bones in cool, worm-ridden gloom
Would shiver in nakedness, when the body had overflowed.
That up there, time would blunder about my work with a
drone
As I sank deeper in the earth and into darkness...
All this I knew. But the work: will it have lasted?
---Miklos Radnoti
In the spring of 1946, a mass grave was unearthed in the
Hungarian village of Abda. Twenty-two decayed bodies were
found sprawled in the pit. One of the bodies found in the
grave was that of the poet Miklos Radnoti, shot into the
grave by Hungarian fascists eighteen months earlier. Found
in the front pocket of his coat was a small notebook soaked
in his bodily fluids. It was laid out to dry in the
sunlight and when examined later revealed the poets last
poems carefully handwritten onto the ruled lines of the
notebook. In the so-called Bor Notebook, Radnoti, through
poetry, told the story of the last six months of his life,
months spent first as slave labor in a Nazi labor camp in
Bor, Serbia, and then on a three-month forced march from
Serbia to the small village of Abda where he was killed
when he was too weak to continue.
NEITHER MEMORY NOR MAGIC will use Radnoti’s final
poems in the Bor Notebook as well as the poems he wrote in
the late thirties and forties as the backbone of the
narrative. The film will tell the story of Radnoti’s
life from the tragedy of his birth that left his mother and
his fraternal twin dead, to the rising tide of
anti-semitism, nationalism, and war that consumed his adult
life, to the final tragedy of his death at the hands of
Hungarian fascists. Readings of Radnoti’s work will
be woven in with archival footage as well as the
recollections of those who remain sixty years later who
knew him personally.
Read the Director's Statement about what led him to make
this film. Click Here
Ferenc Andai on the slope of a copper mine in Bor,
Serbia, the site of the labor camp where he first came to
know Radnoti in 1944 in what would be the last months of
Radnoti's life. Andai returned to Bor in 2005 for the first
time in 61 years. Pictured with him is Cinematographer
Chuck Moss.