Fateless [Paperback]

At the beginning the protagonist is like any other boy on the threshold of manhood, embarrassed by displays of emotion, looking on distastefully at his father and stepmother’s affection for each other. Yet he too finds his emotions awakening and becomes attached to a girl living in the same apartment block.

Although we as readers are privileged and know the import of the events that are unfolding, Guyuri talks matter-of-factly about the ominous signs in his home city: the mandatory wearing of the yellow star, his father’s shopping preparations as he is called to a ‘labour’ camp, and then his own subsequent journey from working at a refinery for the war effort to Auschwitz. He is told that by taking the train he will be given a worthy job and, like all adventurous and naive boys of his age, volunteers for this opportunity with enthusiasm.

Briefly in Auschwitz, Guyuri is soon transferred to another concentration camp and it is here that both he and the reader are surprised by the acceptance of the slow, incremental degradation he observes in himself and in others.

His experiences not only age his body into that of a decrepit old man but also engender a wisdom that many who live to 100 years may never attain. Guyuri realises that survival is only possible because people live their lives one step at a time: to live with the knowledge of what is to come would be an unbearable burden.

Simply written, with some heartbreaking moments (“I would like to live a little longer in this beautiful concentration camp"), it is Guyuri’s astonishing, unique voice that makes this a hugely affecting and remarkable tale.

These words of Goethe provide the emotional context within which I experienced Imre Kertész' masterful novel Fateless.

Kertesz was an assimilated Hungarian-Jew living in relative comfort in Budapest. In the summer of 1944 he was picked up and shipped to Auschwitz. He was fourteen years old. He was transferred from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, from Buchenwald to Zeitz (a lesser-known concentration camp) and then back to Buchenwald. He was liberated a year later and returned to Budapest.

The life of György (George) Köves, the protagonist of Fateless, tracks the experiences of Kertesz. The novel is written in George's voice and we see the world through his recollection of events. (Kertesz has indicated in interviews that although Fateless takes the form of an autobiographical novel it is not an autobiography but a work of fiction.) George is a relatively care free, naive 14 year old leading a middle class life with his family. As the story opens, the family is preparing to say goodbye to George's father who is being sent to a labor camp. I was struck immediately by George's detachment as these early events unfold. George obtains a job at a factory. This provides him with a pass out of his neighborhood although he is still required to wear a yellow star identifying him as Jewish. One morning, on the way to work, he is swept up along with thousands of others and is sent on his journey into the seven layers of hell known as concentration camps. The rest of novel details George's experiences in the camps, his gradual physical deterioration that leaves him near death, the chain of events that kept him alive, his liberation and his eventual return to Budapest.

I expected that any book that had the Holocaust as a central theme would be filled with vivid descriptions of the horrors found there and the emotional turmoil that any prisoner experienced. In fact, the opposite was the case. George's narrative is, until the very end, devoid of emotion. It consists of a spare, narrative recitation of events. I think the book was all the more chilling and had a greater emotional impact as a result. No words can adequately describe the horrors and misery and Kertesz does not really try. Rather, the emotion is inferred from the factual context. At one point, George finds a mirror and looks at his image. He sees in himself the gaunt vision of shuffling prisoners that met him on his arrival at the camps. He doesn't complain, he simply observes. The observation is stunning not for its emotional content but for the very fact of it.

I was also struck by the irony expressed in many of Kertesz' passages. George, like Kertesz, was not particularly religious nor did he speak the lingua franca of many European Jews, Yiddish. Despite his presence in the camp he was rejected by many of his fellow prisoners because he was not, in their eyes, sufficiently Jewish. He didn't know Yiddish nor did he know enough Hebrew to recite the Kaddish, a prayer for the dead. George's camp experience was one of double isolation.

George's emotions only rise to the surface upon his return to Budapest after liberation. He is on a trolley, filthy and malnourished. He can feel the scorn and snickering of his fellow passengers and seethes with anger, an emotion seemingly permitted to enter into his life now that his freedom is assured. He returns to his family apartment only to find that it has been appropriated by another family. His family and friends tell him to put the camps into his past, but he can't, it is an experience that will never be `in the past'. Kertesz, in his Nobel Prize lecture sums it up thusly: "By which I mean that nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refute Auschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense."

The novel ends with George pondering the meaning of life and fate. He posits that those that accept fate can never be free and those seeking freedom cannot do so if the live by the axiom "it is written". The closing puts George's whole camp experience in a new perspective. Some struggle outwardly for freedom. George's struggle was completely internalized. His struggle for life itself was a struggle to be free. As the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman asserted in his book Forever Flowing, "there remained alive and growing one genuine force alone, consisting of one element only - freedom. To live meant to be a free human being."

The story of George Koves is the story of a young boy who struggled every day for freedom and for life and conquered them anew. It is a powerful book and one that I cannot recommend too highly.