Fateless by Imre Kertész

First published:Sorstalanság, 1975 (English translation, 1992; also as Fatelessness, 2004)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: 1944-1945

Locale: Budapest; Auschwitz, German-occupied Poland; Buchenwald and Zeitz, Germany

Principal characters

• George Köves, a fifteen-year-old Hungarian Jew
• Bandi Citrom, a fellow prisoner
• Uncle Lajos, his uncle
• Uncle Steiner and Uncle Fleischmann, old family friends

The Story:

Although his perspective is cool and calm, the story George Köves tells of his arrest and incarceration by the Nazis builds to a harrowing vision of evil. His ordeal begins in his home in Hungary, where things are already unraveling. George’s parents have divorced, and his father, because he is a Jew, has been forced to relinquish his successful business and work instead in a German labor camp. Although George’s Uncle Lajos tells him that he must accept what is happening and understand that such persecution is the Jewish fate, George does not agree. Similarly, he resists his little girlfriend’s suggestion that his Jewish identity is fated by biology. George upsets his uncle and his playmate when he refuses to accept the premise that his life is somehow in the hands of a predetermined collective destiny. Nevertheless, it is as a Jew rather than for any more personal reason that George is first forced to labor at an oil refinery outside Budapest and then sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. His identity is made even more impersonal and abstract when his name is taken from him in the camps and he is known only as #64,921.

Along with the other boys with whom he was arrested, George has claimed to be one year older than he really is because he has been told that as an older boy he is more likely to be put to work rather than slaughtered in the gas chambers. After a short time at Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, George is transferred to Zeitz, a work camp where he labors in a quarry. He begins to understand that, despite everything, he and his fellow prisoners are still not completely under the rule of the Nazis; they are free to dissent from the Nazi perspective and to resist its perverse logic.

George describes this resistance to himself as stubbornness. His own detached perspective is one instance of this stubbornness; another is the way the prisoners help one another rather than descending to the law of the jungle as the Nazis expect them to do. For instance, a fellow prisoner makes sure that the young George’s food ration is not purloined. Even more important, a fellow Hungarian, a resourceful twenty-year-old man named Bandi Citrom, befriends George. Bandi gives him numerous tips that will help him survive the hardships of his circumstances.

Bandi’s belief in the value of an ordered, ethical daily life rescues George from confusion and despair and represents another way to dissent from the demoralizing, dehumanizing world of the camps. Another form of resistance is George’s imagination: Even though he is captive, his imagination is still free, and he can travel backward in his mind to memories of safety and comfort, as well as imagining hopeful future scenarios. The idea of the future is crucial to George’s ability to resist the Nazi regime. An important aspect of his developing philosophy of life is that he understands that the future can always bring change, new possibilities, and alternatives unforeseen in the present.

At Zeitz, the young boys with whom George was originally arrested have been dispersed. Having lost the sense of adventure with which they began their imprisonment, the youths have either died or become old before their time. In another sign that things are changing for the worse, food becomes more closely rationed, enfeebling and emaciating George. Already weakened by a leg wounded while working at the quarry, George’s health fails to such an extent that he hovers near death. Although he is dying, however, he knows that the Nazis cannot deprive him of his will to live or of his appreciation of life itself, which, even in the concentration camp, he finds beautiful. Just when George is at his lowest ebb, things take an unexpected turn when, instead of being delivered to the crematorium, George is brought to the infirmary, where he is nursed back to health and given extra food by two compassionate attendants. On top of this almost miraculous change in his fortunes is the surprising and sudden collapse of the seemingly invincible Nazi system. The war ends, American soldiers liberate the camp, and George is sent home to Hungary.

Embittered by his experience and further upset by the distinct possibility that his friend Bandi has not survived, George finds he must endure what he feels are absurd questions from a journalist. George refuses to cooperate with the journalist’s wish for an inspiring article, instead telling him that, far from feeling safe back in civilization, what he feels is implacable hatred for everyone and everything in the outside world. His repeated use of the word “naturally” when the journalist asks about his experience further suggests that the camps were the natural outcome of a larger social system in which the journalist himself lives and that the journalist has failed to question.

In Budapest, George confronts Uncle Steiner and Uncle Fleischmann, old family friends who managed to avoid arrest and deportation to the camps and who fail to understand the suffering George has endured. As with the journalist, George informs them that the concentration camps are one aspect of a larger European social disorder, a continuation of a system to which they all belonged. This conversation demonstrates the alienation George feels from his family and his old world, which he does not perceive as an exception from the system that produced the camps. Instead, he remembers the times within the camps, where, George feels, the reality of European modernity had to be recognized for what it was.

This recognition of the corruption of modernity, paradoxically, was what allowed George to secure an independence from it. In the camps, George understood that he could transcend the circumstances dictated by the camp, affirming the beauty and importance of life itself. It is this philosophy that will sustain him in the postwar world of Hungary, still shadowed as it is by totalitarianism even after the fall of the Nazis. It is understood that George has come of age; he is no longer a child and will think for himself. He will not give in to despair but will continue to live with that sense of inner freedom that sustained him throughout his time in the Nazi concentration camps.

Bibliography

Adelman, Gary. “Getting Started with Imre Kertész.” New England Review: Middlebury Series 25, nos. 1/2 (2004): 261-278. Discusses Fateless as a redemptive novel in which the mental clarity of the conclusion promises a successful future.

Bachmann, Michael. “Life, Writing, and Problems of Genre in Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész.” Rocky Mountain Review 63, no. 1 (Spring, 2009): 79-88. Compares and contrasts the works of Kertész and Elie Wiesel in terms of their status as “witness literature.” Examines Kertész as keeping his work alive in a zone somewhere between testimony and fiction.

Kertész, Imre. “Eureka! The 2002 Nobel Lecture.” World Literature Today 77, no. 1 (April-June, 2003): 4-8. Kertész’s Nobel Prize lecture discusses the Holocaust as a trauma of European civilization, but affirms liberty as the greatest European value.

Nádas, Péter. “Imre Kertész’s Work and His Subject.” Hungarian Quarterly 43, no. 168 (Winter, 2002): 38-40. Discusses the impact of the Holocaust on Kertész’s work and the connections Kertész makes between Nazi and Communist dictatorships

Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust Novel. New York: Routledge, 2005. Discusses Kertész’s work in the context of Holocaust literature as a major postwar literary genre—and in terms not only of fiction but also of history and autobiography. Chronology and annotated bibliography.

Vasvári, Louise O., and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, eds. Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2005. This important study of Kertész features essays by scholars from various countries; discusses narrative techniques, film treatment, the Holocaust, and Jewish identity. Includes a bibliography.