Surviving Words

With haunting simplicity, Farkas conveys the horrors that humans inflict upon each other. The book begins with his parents’ experiences in Auschwitz and Belsen, moves on to deal with his own childhood memories of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and concludes with poems about contemporary acts of genocide. Although political in topic and theme, the poems in Surviving Words are strikingly individual. Farkas’ book reminds us that “Nothing is forgotten,/ nothing is ever forgotten.”