Fatelessness Paperback – December 7, 2004

Review of Imre Kertesz’s FatelessnessWhen Luisa Zielinski interviewed the Hungarian writer, Nobel Prize winner (2002) and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz in the Paris Review during the summer of 2013, the author was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease. (See Imre Kertesz. “The Art of Fiction”, Paris Review No. 220, interviewed by Luisa Zielinksi) Despite being seriously ill, Kertesz spoke with characteristic lucidity about his fiction as well as about the Holocaust. Born in 1929 in Budapest, Kertesz was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 for a short period of time, and then transferred to Buchenwald. His works deal with the Holocaust, yet they are not strictly speaking autobiographical. Fatelessness (Vintage International, 2004) in particular seems to parallel Kertesz’s experiences in Nazi concentration camps, but the author focuses on the subject’s historic-philosophical dimensions. Kertesz views his description of the Holocaust in Fatelessness as a rupture of civilization that the entire world should examine and take seriously rather than an anecdote of his own trying experiences during adolescence. “I was interned in Auschwitz for one year,” he recalls. “I didn’t bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn’t know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.” Writing as a mode of reflection and communication with others rather than in order to come to terms with his painful personal experiences assumed, at some point, primary importance for him.Yet, as Kertesz recounts during the Paris Review interview, he didn’t feel destined to be a writer. Rather, he became a writer by painstakingly editing his own texts. The process of writing wasn’t easy, both because of the difficult subject matter he chose and because he had to hide his endeavors from the Communist regime. In fact, the experience of totalitarian repression forms a common thread between his experience of Nazism and of the repressive regime that followed it. “I was suspended in a world that was forever foreign to me, one I had to reenter each day with no hope of relief. That was true of Stalinist Hungary, but even more so under National Socialism,” he declares.Despite the broad socio-political sweep of his themes, Kertesz’s fiction, particularly the novel Fatelessness, reads like an intimate psychological account of a young man’s disconcerting and painful experience of being uprooted from his family, schoolmates and friends to be thrust into the alien and brutal world of the Nazi concentration camps. Gyorgy Koves, the 15-year old protagonist, first loses his father, who is deported to and dies in labor camp. His stepmother and a Hungarian employee continue taking care of the family business, a store, and are fortunate enough to survive the war and eventually marry each other. But Gyorgy (George) lacks such luck. Along with a throng of teenage boys, he’s rounded up by the Hungarian Arrow Cross and sent to forced labor, then deported to Auschwitz. Fatelessness depicts his experiences there.There are countless books on the Holocaust. The subject has been written about so much that some readers risk being jaded to it. This novel is especially effective in rendering this familiar topic new and touching. One of the most unique aspects of the novel is its present temporality: the adolescent narrator describes his experiences in the present, as if writing in a diary, noting every character’s expression and interspersing realistic dialogues without offering much judgment or analysis. Kertesz considers this observational technique as appropriate for a child narrator. As he explains, “a child has no agency in his own life and is forced to endure it all”. While few Jewish victims had much agency during the Holocaust, adults at least had the emotional maturity to realize what was happening to them and understand some of the socio-political reasons why. Child victims, on the other hand, were swept by the Nazi extermination machine without being able to comprehend the events that destroyed their lives or do anything about it. Given the almost existentialist nature of Kertesz’s writing, how much of Fatelessness is based on the author’s life and how much of it is historical fiction becomes far less relevant than the narrative’s powerful and immediate connection to generations of readers.Claudia Moscovici, Holocaust Memory

I had ordered this book because it was referenced in several books that had been enlightening. It is an excellent narrative of a young Jewish boy from Budapest who is rounded up and sent first to Auschwitz, then transported to Buchenwald, then to Kietz and back again to Buchewald from which he is liberated.It is interesting particularly because of the psychological workings of the mind of the narrator, who survives by dealing only with the moment before him. Realizing only after his liberation that had anyone taken in fully the reality and implications of what was occurring they would have lost their mind and body. The mind is amazing in the way it can disassociate as a protection, also the distraction of starvation and how it affects mental capacities to discern what is all about you is made apparent.Some narratives from or about survivors are more heroic, yet there is something so telling in this narration that speak to a greater horror of being in a circumstance beyond one's control where survival depends on making it through the minute ahead of you.Very moving.

After György Köves goes through intake processing at Auschwitz, as a prelude to being sent along to Buchenwald, he records the disparate treatments meted out to the two groups into which all arriving Hungarian Jews had been segregated immediately after their release from the railroad cars. Those who were physically fit, like himself, had been sent from the station to the baths, where they had been told to place their clothes on a numbered hook and to remember the number (leading them to believe they would reclaim those clothes after the showers) and where every third prisoner was handed a piece of soap with instructions to share it with two others. Meanwhile, those who were judged unfit for work, including many women and small children, went through much the same procedure: "They too had proceeded from the station to the baths. They too had been informed about the hooks, the numbers, and the washing procedure, just the same as us. * * * Then they too had entered the bathroom itself, with the same pipes and showerheads, so I heard, only out of these came, not water, but gas."That's one aspect of FATELESSNESS: a prosaic yet detailed and memorable account of the operations of the Nazi concentration/extermination camps, told from the perspective of fourteen-year-old György, who was rounded up during a dragnet conducted in Budapest in the spring of 1944. Another aspect of FATELESSNESS is György's speculations, or reflections, on the perpetrators, the choreographers of the concentration camps. For example, as regards the baths:"After all, people would have had to meet to discuss this, put their heads together so to say, even if they were not exactly students but mature adults, quite possibly--indeed, in all likelihood--gentlemen in imposing suits, decorations on their chests, cigars in their mouths, presumably all in high command * * *. One of them comes up with the gas, another immediately follows with the bathhouse, a third with the soap, * * * and so on. Some of the ideas may have provoked more prolonged discussion and amendment, whereas others would have been immediately hailed with delight * * *."Yet a third aspect of the novel concerns the effect of it all on the survivors of the concentration camps. György's thoughts on this subject are somewhat unorthodox, maybe even heretical. They are the antithesis of the conventional wisdom (as of fifty years ago) that "you must put the horrors behind you" and they are inextricably bound up with the title of the novel. I won't say more, because Imre Kertész's philosophical/psychological response to the Holocaust should be read as he presents it.By the way, Imre Kertész, as a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy in Budapest, was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, then Zeitz, and then back to Buchenwald, just like György Köves. But Kertész contends that FATELESSNESS is not autobiographical, that it is indeed a work of fiction. To me, it is the fictional counterpart to Primo Levi's classic memoir of a year in Auschwitz, "If This Is a Man". The power of both works inheres in the understated, matter-of-fact quality of their narratives. And in both, there are neither heroes nor victims, but only survivors and the dead.Though simply written, FATELESSNESS is not a simple book. It may bewilder some readers and it may anger some Jews. But it deserves to be read. It is, as incongruous as this may sound for "Holocaust literature", a small jewel of a novel.

I have a tradition when travelling to pick up a book by an author fro that country. Sometimes this results in me getting a book that I wouldn't recommend, not because the book are bad but that they are very specific to the country I have visited. In this case however I can advise this book. I picked this up when visiting Hungary and researching and reading a lot about their Nazi and Soviet dictators. Everyone the world over has heard of the horrors of Nazi and so this book is not far from something we have all heard about. Definitely worth a read.

I still have this young man in my mind long after finishing the book. There were so many lose ends I wanted cleared up but, of course, life isn't like that. I was amazed at how such a young boy could have so much perception and rationality in such a place. It was only when he was finally released and made his way back home that my emotions got the better of me. I think he felt the same way too. His attitude to the whole ordeal throughout his time in the camps was amazingly sanguine. When he finally had freedom and came up against the ignorence of people he came into contact with he really felt a longing almost to be back in the camp where everything was clear and straightforward - you just accepted it. I loved this book and clearly I am not alone.

Not an easy read, it seems like a very literal translation but you soon get immersed in it. It's a heartbreaking, strange and moving view of a youth and his reaction to being in a concentration camp. It's quite unlike anything I've come across in this genre.

I see now why he won the Nobel prize for literature in 2002. It's an important story, based on a real story, representing many. An iconic story, of survival.

I recommend the book as something different in describing the experiences in concentration camps. The film is also worth watching, once you have read the book