Fatelessness by Imre Kertész

Impassive account of Nazi concentration camps

Hungarian author Imre Kertész (1929-2016) won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. To this date, he is Hungary’s only Nobel laureate in literature. Kertész’s debut novel Fatelessness, published in 1975, is about a 14-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy and his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Although Kertész once asserted that Fatelessness was not an autobiographical novel, the story closely parallels events in the life of the author, who himself at 14 was imprisoned in the same concentration camps as the novel’s narrator. No doubt the vivid descriptions of life and death in the camps is informed by Kertész’s own first-hand experiences.

As the novel opens, the 14-year-old narrator György Köves is living in Budapest with his father and stepmother. The father has just received an order to report to a Nazi labor camp in a few days. The night before his departure, family and friends gather for a goodbye dinner. Everyone, with the possible exception of György, suspects there is a good chance the father may not return from the labor camp, but no one wants to say it out loud. After the father leaves, György gets a work permit for employment at a petroleum refinery on Csepel Island in the Danube. He likes the work well enough, and he’s happy to be employed. One day, however, the bus that shuttles him from Budapest to the island is stopped by police. György and his coworkers, all Jews, are asked to exit the bus and assemble at a nearby holding station to have their papers examined. The workers see this as merely a bureaucratic inconvenience, until they are detained overnight and then informed that they will be sent to a work camp in Germany. They and many other Jews are then packed and locked into train cars for a three-day journey without a drink of water.

The destination is Auschwitz. The narrator is eventually transferred to Buchenwald and then to a third camp named Zeitz. While today those place names inspire horror due to the atrocities committed there, in Kertész’s narrative, the Jewish internees (or at least the teenagers among them) are very unsuspecting of the camps’ ultimate purpose. During his train ride to Germany, György actually looks forward to arriving at a new work camp. Hopefully the food will be good and the beds comfortable. It never appears to bother him that his family doesn’t know what happened to him, and he may never see them again. Perhaps this is an indication of the Hungarian mindset at the time, having been under the yoke of Germany and the Nazis for some years prior. By this time, the Jews were probably accustomed to oppression, but they were not expecting the mass extermination that was awaiting them at the camps. György eludes execution because he is a male of an age suitable for slave labor.

The tone of this novel is oddly unlike any other Holocaust narrative I’ve ever encountered. The overall feeling is one of abject and even bemused resignation. The narrator describes horrible things he’s seen but never expresses horror, outrage, anger, and very rarely fear. He does complain about hunger and pain, but with an emotionless air of weary acceptance. Kertész is not writing a tearjerking drama here; it reads more like investigative journalism. György speaks almost as if he deserved this treatment, or it was a fate he was powerless to resist. Over time this seems to build into a self-criticism by Kertész, most blatantly in the final chapter, that the Jews were somehow complicit in their tragedy by not being outraged enough, by indulging in too much passive acceptance, as epitomized by György. Of course, that’s only my gentile interpretation of Kertész’s intent, for what it’s worth, which might not be much. After reading Fatelessness, however, I understand more than I did before. Kertész’s rather deadpan descriptions of what went on at Auschwitz and Buchenwald hit me with the reality of the concentration camps more powerfully than many of the more overtly emotional Holocaust dramas that I’ve come across.