Ultimately, Radnóti was able to prevail with desire for another education and began studying philosophy, Hungarian and French at the University of Szeged.

In September 1940, he was conscripted to a labor battalion (a kind of unarmed military service, initially for those unfit for armed service, but increasingly, as the world war progressed, a punishment for citizens considered untrustworthy like leftists, dissidents, Jews) of the Royal Hungarian Army until December of that year, then from July 1942 to April 1943 for the second time.

On 17 September 1944, the battalion was commanded to leave the camp on foot in two groups in a forced march to flee the advancing Allied armies.

In November 1944, because of their total physical and mental exhaustion, Radnóti and twenty other prisoners were fatally shot and buried in a mass grave near the dam at Abda, by a guard squad of a commander and four soldiers of the Royal Hungarian Army.

On 12 August 1946, his widow, Fanni Gyarmati went to Győr with Gyula Ortutay, Gábor Tolnai and Dezső Baróti to identify the body of her husband that was exhumed for the second time.

In his work titled Ecce homo (Canadian Hungarian Newspaper, 2011), Tamás Szemenyei-Kiss describes how at the time of the second exhumation in Győr, Fanni Gyarmati had not seen her husband and was shown several objects that had never belonged to Radnóti.

András Tálas, immediately joined the Communist Party of Hungary after the end of the Second World War, but he was arrested as part of a Stalinist political purge on 7 August 1945.

There was a strictly confidential investigation conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs III during the communist era between 1967–1977, which identified four Royal Hungarian Army soldiers under of the command of Sgt.

Sándor Kunos and János Malakuczi, however, who were not Party members, remained under covert surveillance by the Hungarian secret police (ÁVO).

His works were translated into English by Edward G. Emery and Frederick Turner, into Serbo-Croatian by Danilo Kiš, into German by Franz Fühmann and into French by Jean-Luc Moreau [fr].