The burden of guilt assumed by several European states by participating in the WW2 Holocaust of Jews has emerged as an issue of international concern in the French presidential elections, which are set to conclude on May 7. The poem below, composed in 1942 in outrage at the psychological preparation of society to commit mass murder, was probably the author’s last. Ernő Szép (1884-1953), a Jewish-Hungarian poet, journalist, novelist and for long a fashionable playwright, survived the Nazi horror to die alone and forgotten – some say he starved to death – during the subsequent Soviet era. |