Published: 26 January, 2012
by ANDREW JOHNSON

We all know about the Holocaust – at least think we do.

There are so many books, museums, yellowing photographs and grainy moving images – all helping to keep the shadow of Europe’s darkest hour cast firmly across the present.

Yet, there is always something else to remind us how much there is to know.

The celebrated Hungarian poet George Gömöri and his wife Mari, who lives in South Hampstead, have just produced a short collection of poems by Hungarian victims of the Holocaust which give another perspective on the horror of the time.

Some of the poems put us inside the camps, help us to see “the wires go taut” in the moon’s light; others are from observers, such as a Hungarian soldier who witnessed forced marches.

Some are written by children and grandchildren of those who perished.

Mari explains that these people too are victims, two generations have grown up with a hole where their parent or grandparent should be.

George and Mari are a stark reminder that while for many the Holocaust is an historical event it is still in living memory, and reverberates down the generations.

George, 76, was protected in the final years of the war by a group of nuns who kept him – on false papers – in their convent. His grandfather, however, perished on the train to Auschwitz.

George escaped the subsequent communist regime after taking part in the 1956 revolution as a student, coming to England to study at Oxford, and later teaching at Cambridge.

Mari, born in 1946 to Jewish parents who had survived the ghetto in Budapest, escaped to England in the same year as George, when she was 10.

She remembers escorting her grandmother – who had an English passport – to the border with Austria. While granny continued on her way, the family spent eight hours avoiding border guards and lights – “sometimes with our faces down in the mud” – until they could find away across.

“We are typical of a Jewish continental family in this century,” Mari adds.

Their collaboration, then, is a very personal one.

It was important, they say, that they had Hungarian poets who could express all aspects of the Holocaust.

But also, adds George, that they found Gypsy voices because the Gypsies are often overlooked victims of Hitler’s racial lunacy.

“At their camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau they were allowed to stay for a time with their families,” he explains. “At some point in 1944 camp guards tried to take the men away. They fought back with stones and pieces of wood because they wanted to protect their woman and children. So the kapos [prisoners who were put in charge of various duties in the camps] left them alone for two months after which the SS came and machine-gunned the entire camp. There are no memorials to the Gypsy victims, we don’t know where they are buried.”

Mari adds that the Gypsies are once again becoming the scapegoats in Hungary.

“It’s horribly reminiscent of what was going on before the war,” she says. They both add that for this reason they are pleased that the Hungarian embassy is supporting the project.

“In England you always feel there is someone to turn to, in the Nazi and communist era it was state induced,” she says. “In England no matter how awful something is, there is somebody. What sets the Holocaust apart is that it happened in a civilised country, in the mid 20th-century – a country that had produced Beethoven and Goethe, some of the greatest art, literature and music in the world. And it developed a national policy to exterminate an entire race of people. That’s why we can never rest easy in our beds.”

The collection of poetry came about after musicians Marianne Olyver, a violinist, and pianist Robert Schuck were commissioned to produce a programme of music for Jewish Book Week last year.

They specialise in Gypsy music by composers affected by Nazi Germany. Feeling there should be something literary to go with it they approached Mari – a former concert promoter – who says “a light just went on”.

George and Mari have researched the poems themselves, and translated them with other poets including Clive Wilmer and George Szirtes. Historian Sir Martin Gilbert has written an introduction.

Mari, however, is keen to finish on a positive note – pointing out that many would not have survived the Holocaust without the help of ordinary people, who risked their lives to do so.

The couple tell a story of a woman who saved 2,000 children and for each one wrote down their details and buried the paper in the ground in a jam jar, so that after the war they could find out who they were.

• I Lived on This Earth: Hungarian Poets on the Holocaust is published by Alba Press on February 27. It will be available at Blackwells or can be ordered at albapress.info @yahoo.co.uk