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VOLUME XXXVI * No. 140 * Winter 1995
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Ivan Sanders
"Not to be described"
Ernô Szép: The Smell of Humans: A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary. Translated by John Bátki. With an introductory essay by Dezsô Tandori. Central European University Press, Budapest, London, New York, 1994, xxvi + 175 pp.
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The Smell of Humans relates the three-week ordeal of a sixty-year-old Hungarian writer during the final phase of the Second World War, when organized deportations of Jews from Hungary more or less ceased, but a reign of terror was unleashed by Hungarian Fascists who seized power in mid-October of 1944. Along with hundreds of other elderly Jews, the writer was picked up by Arrow Cross thugs and led on a forced march to a village near the capital, where the captives were made to dig trenches—completely senselessly, since everyone knew the war was just about over. Or did they? Ernô Szép's book is at its perceptive best when describing the uncertain state of mind of both victims and aggressors—their despair, their terror, their cruelty, and above all, their delusions.
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Ernô Szép is known in Hungary primarily as a poet of subtle moods and nostalgic evocations, a consummate literary artist whose language and imagery have the makings of poésie pure. But this is a simplified view. Szép's prose is actually quite robust, in spite of the delicate use of language, and even as a poet he wasn't quite so ethereal or apolitical. (His "Imádság" [Prayer] is one of the most fervently patriotic poems in Hungarian literature.)
Szép's guilelessness and self-effacement are part of a carefully cultivated literary persona; as is his mock-innocent style. Indeed, like most Central European writers, Ernô Szép was a superb ironist with an eye for the odd, the grotesque. What is remarkable about his wartime journal is its sparseness. This time the languorous, utterly refined poet keeps his mannerisms and bohemian affectations to a minimum, and like a no-nonsense reporter concentrates on facts, details, proving that he is, above all, a highly professional and disciplined writer.
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teaches literature at the State University of New York and the New School for Social Research. He has translated novels by Milán Füst, György Konrád and Péter Nádas.
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