“If it was spared from the water, was it spared from people?”

Documents about Miklós Radnóti’s lost library

Abstract

In April 1944, Miklós Radnóti and his wife, Fanni Gyarmati, packed their valuable private library of roughly 4,000 volumes in eight crates and transferred them to a basement on the Buda side of the Danube. Zoltán Steuer, an admirer of the poet, donated the crates, and Sára Karig, a mutual friend, found the shelter. The couple sent their other possessions, including daily necessities, manuscripts of the poet’s works, and letters, to a number of other locations, mostly to the homes of friends, in an effort to ensure their safety. Even though practically all of their belongings, including their clothes and typewriter, were destroyed, fortunately, the papers and letters were saved. The crates that contained their personal library, however, were the biggest loss. The books are thought to have been destroyed by the Danube flood in the spring of 1945. In spite of the fact that the Danube did in fact inundate the basement, it is most likely that the books had already disappeared from there, according to the present analysis of the records of the Budapest floods, unpublished papers and letters in the poet and his wife’s estate, and Fanni Gyarmati’s journal entries. Unfortunately, the rhetorical question quoted in the title, “If it has survived the water, has it survived the people?” by Fanni Gyarmati, cannot be answered positively. An appendix to the present study contains a list of sources for information about the lost library.