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It is the evening of May 19, 1944, and Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti is spending his last night with his wife Fanni. Tomorrow, he must join a battalion of forced laborers. Along with 6000 other Hungarian-Jewish conscripts, Radnóti will serve as slave labor, building a railroad line in support of copper mines in German-occupied Serbia. On this last night at home, an unseen presence can be felt alongside the couple, a presence that moves “through the pauses, through the breaths, through the spaces around them.” It is Death, who some say “is in love with poetry.” On their last night together, Fanni and Mik sing of their love, as well as the struggles in their marriage, as Death looks on the future. Sometime in November, Mik will be dead, shot like many others on a death march and buried in a mass grave. After the war, the grave will be exhumed, and Mik's body will be identified by the small book of poems in his coat pocket. The poems will distinguish Radnóti as one of Hungary's greatest poets and a major witness to the Holocaust.
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