AS THE elections to the new European Parliament demonstrate, nazi, neofascist and xenophobic parties are on the violent march again across Europe.

Hiding behind the fear of immigrants and opposition to the EU, anti-semitic, anti-Roma, anti-Muslim and homophobic politics are now in the political mainstream.

In Hungary — where the “radical nationalist” Jobbik is now the second-largest party — a memorial to the Hungarian Jewish poet Miklos Radnoti was recently broken and his books burned.

A new statue to second world war leader, the nazi-allied Miklos Horthy, stands in Szabadsag Ter (Freedom Square).

Anti-semitic authors are included in the national school curriculum and the new constitution repudiates responsibility for the genocide committed by the Hungarian state in collaboration with nazi Germany.

The facts are that between March 1944 and April 1945, half a million Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissidents were transported by the Hungarian authorities to extermination camps, mostly in Poland and Austria.

Tens of thousands were enslaved in labour camps. Almost three-quarters of Hungary’s Jewish population perished.

Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets Of The Holocaust (Smokestack Books, £8.95) is a brave attempt to counter these attempts to falsify history by reminding us how aggressive xenophobia begins and how it ends.

Edited by Thomas Orszag-Land, who survived the Holocaust in Hungary, the 1944-5 siege of Budapest and the events of 1956, Survivors brings together for the first time in English poems about the Hungarian Holocaust.

The anthology by 18 poets is about political barbarism, mass murder and complicity in it, written by those who “looked evil in the face, and dedicated their lives to warning humanity about fascism.”

There are some stunning poems here, notably Orszag-Land’s Meeting — about Kurt Waldheim — and The Name — about Eichmann —along with Miklos Radnoti’s Death March, War Diary and Picture Postcards.    

Some poems, like Erno Szep’s The Truth, address the propaganda that creates the intellectual and moral climate of genocide:

“The truth is that they lie to you

inciting docile folks to hatred.

Resist, resist, resist their truth

of infamy, of ruthlessness.

The newspapers project a lie.

They twist the truth and peddle drivel

and spew their raving explanations

to kindle mass hysteria.”

Others, like Andras Mezei’s Roads, record the horrors with a painful, documentary realism:

“The columns shrunk — for the frail ones fell behind

or sought survival by scooping up some snow

to quench their thirst in the mountains along the route

to Dachau, or briefly stooped to tighten their boots

or pick up a snail or a fistful of grass or rape

to fill their mouths and fool their famished stomachs...

Their corpses were left among the fruit of the fields,

among the snails, the grass, the rape, the clover.    

Some 13,000 civilian captives dispatched

on a 300km march

that took 8 days. Some 1,800 arrived.”

One of those who did not survive the forced marches was Miklos Radnoti:

“Lying on boards, I am a captive beast among vermin,

the fleas renew their siege but the flies have at last retired.

Evening has come; my captivity, behold, is curtailed

by a day and so is my life. The camp is asleep. The moonshine

lights up the land and highlights the taut barbed wire fence,

It draws the shadow of armed prison guards, seen through the window...”

Eszter Forrai’s Steps is a memorial to the children executed on the banks of the Danube by Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross militia:

“It was January

and the steps were cruelly cold,

the steps that led down to the icy Danube —

we were told to remove our shoes

and stand in barefooted lines

as the soldiers loaded their rifles

beneath the weeping sky.”

Like Gyula Pauer’s famous stone shoes on the Danube embankment, this poem is about the past and the present at the same time.

For as Dan Dalmat explains in Epitaph, the killers have not gone away:

“I was marched with frozen feet along the shores of the Don,

 I was pounded by hails of rifle-butt blows in Serbia’s mountains.
 
My broken bones at last have merged with the sane mother earth.

A gust of wind alone reminds my folks of my ghost.

And my good name is lost. And only my guards survive.

And my killers remain in charge... even of my dust.”