Poet. He is considered one of the most important 20th-century Hungarian poets and a victim of The Holocaust. Being Jewish, he was the target of the Nazi agenda of their anti-Semitic regime. As part of this agenda, he was killed at the age of thirty-five during World War II on a forced march. He was buried in a mass grave but exhumed in 1946. At the exhumation, Radnóti's last ten poems, which were written in a notebook during the march, were discovered in his grave. Born Miklós Glatter, his twin brother and mother died soon after his birth, and his father in 1921, thus an aunt and uncle cared for him during most of his childhood. After finishing his public education in the textile district schools, he studied philosophy, Hungarian and French language at the University of Szeged. Following the publishing his avant-garde and expressionism style of poetry in magazines, such as "Progresss," he published his first collection of verse, "Pogány köszöntõ" in 1930. He formed important friendships with many prominent artists and intellectuals with having their own political viewpoints of antifascist. His second collection, "Újmódi pásztorok éneke" or "Song of New-Fashioned Shepherds" in 1931, was banned by the government for subversion and offending public taste, and with no freedom of the press, he escaped being imprisoned for the writing. In 1934, he finished his studies with the philosophical doctoral thesis "The Artistic Development of Margit Kaffka." After graduation, he changed his name to Radnóti. He became a high school teacher and married Fanni Gyarmati in August of 1935. With his wife, he traveled to France often. He translated a prolific amount of French literature into Hungarian. World War II in Europe started in 1939 with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Forces. Politically, he was an antifascist. In September of 1940, he was conscripted to a Jewish labor battalion of the Hungarian Army until December of that year, then from July 1942 to April 1943 for the second time. At one point, he worked along the Ukrainian front, arming and disarming explosives. In fear for their lives as Jews, he and his wife converted on May 2, 1943, from Judaism to the Roman Catholic faith. Some of his closest relatives had been taken to a concentration camp in Poland. In May of 1944, Radnóti's third military service started, and his battalion was deported to Bor in Serbia. He was considered not worthy of the military and became part of the Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers, which were imprisoned nearby Bor's copper mines. These mines produced 50% of the copper requirement of the German war industry. One source stated that he had been taken at one point to German-occupied Yugoslavia, which is now Serbia, to build a railroad. With the advancing of Russian Allied Armies, he was forced to march in a retreat starting on September 17, 1944 with another 3,600 prisoners. The nearly 70-mile inhuman march within two weeks was from the camp at Bor to Szentkirályszabadja with armed guards on horseback. Many of his Jewish colleagues could not continue on the march, suffering from total physical and mental exhaustion. The men were beaten by the guards, poorly fed and not given enough water. Nearly 500 Jews were randomly massacred near the town of Cervenka and another 500 in Sivac in October, and all were buried in mass unmarked graves. The poem "Postcard 4" described the second massacre, which Miklós Lorsi, the noted violinist was executed. After receiving a gunshot wound during the massacre, Lorsi was shot in the back of head while Randnoti was helping him to continue on the march. He scribbled with his hidden pencil in his notebook his last poem "Postcard 4" on October 31st. Realizing the march had been turned toward Germany weeks early, the men continued on the journey. In November of 1944, he and twenty-one other prisoners were executed by members of the Hungarian Guards and buried in a mass grave. A statue was erected in his honor in Budapest. During his life-time, he wrote seven collections of poetry and his memoir, "Ikrek hava" in 1940; which was published as "Under Gemini" in English in 1985. Gemini as he once had a twin. His final 128-page collection, "Tjtékos ég" was published posthumously in 1946. The collection contains "A Letter to My Wife," which was authored shortly before the forced march, and "Postcard 4," his last poem. "Tjtékos ég" has been translated into English and published as the collection "Clouded Sky" in 1988, which was revised for a 2003 edition. The romantic pre-war poems of his are often overlooked for the documentation of the force march. The 1989 film "Force March" brought this ordeal to public attention.