Fatelessness
by Imre Kert?sz
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Book Summary Information
Author: Imre Kert?szTranslator: Tim Wilkinson
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2004-12-07
ISBN: 1400078636
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Fatelessness
Book Review: The Holocaust, Up Close and Personal
Summary: 5 Stars
I obtained this book because my maiden name is Kertesz, and although it is a common name in Hungary, I wondered if the author might be related to my father's family. But the author is Jewish, although his character in the book is a secular Jew, and I am not. Jewish, that is. Unless of course, Like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, I really am.
The book is a first person narration by a teen-age boy who, during World War II, is sent to Aushwitz, then to Buchenwald. He tells his story in a matter-of-fact tone, without any overt rancor for the horrible conditions he finds. He is merely amazed when he realizes what is causing the smell and the smoke at Aushwitz, and he thinks about the people who were sent to the other line and realizes what that actually meant. Because he is young and healthy, he is still alive.
But as the story progresses and he is sent to a work detail at a different camp where the food dwindles, his inadequate footwear creates open sores and the guards beat him, he finds life slipping away. But he still doesn't complain about the bad treatment, he just tells us what it was like. He doesn't say he misses his family or think about dying, until he finds himself in such poor condition he cannot go on and he collapses, collected by his fellow inmates and dumped in a cart with others too sick and weak to work. He figures he may be going to the "showers" that dispense gas instead of water, but it doesn't happen. He lands in a hospital of sorts within the camp where fellow inmates treat him with kindness, which he is slow to understand. He is hampered by the different languages his fellow prisoners speak, but he begins to feel that life is good. He is no longer on the work detail, he is allowed to rest, and this continues until the camp is liberated.
But there is no triumphant scene with GI Joe barging in and rounding up Nazis, just a young boy listening to the voices on the loudspeaker repeat in all the languages spoken in the camp that they are all free. There is no big reaction by the narrator to this news. He just wants to get his daily ration of soup. But the story does take us forward to his journey back to Hungary to his home. He finds another family living in the apartment he shared with his father and step-mother. He learns from a neighbor that his father, who, earlier in the story had been ordered to a work camp, has died in Nazi captivity and his step-mother has remarried to the man to whom the boy's father had left his business. Fortunately, he also has a mother, who is alive.
As the narrator is on his way home, he meets a number of people who are curious about the camps, and they want to know if there were really gas chambers. Our boy, who is still limping and in pain from his injuries, tells them, yes, there were gas chambers, but he is strangely unwilling to say anything further, or to express anger at what he's been through. The word "Nazi" is not used in the book. It is this flat unemotional tone that makes this book unusual, and I can only think it must in many ways mirror the author's own experience, as he himself was a prisoner at Buchenwald.
I admit I twice stopped reading this book, thinking I could not bear to go on with it, but each time I felt I had to finish a book by an author with my family name. While the narrator does not engage in angry denunciations, he doesn't have to - the tale he tells has plenty of impact and the words are emotinally difficult to read. Was the narrator a victim of "Stockholm Syndrome" where prisoners begin to identify with their captors? Or was he simply shutting down his feelings in order to survive? There are no long ruminations about the political scene and what went wrong, no moral judgments on a society gone off the deep end. There is just the words of a young boy telling how he happened to be on a bus one day when the bus was stopped by guards and all Jews were told to get off. The boy could not pretend he was not Jewish since he was wearing the yellow star that Jews were required to wear. So he got off the bus and that began his trip to Aushwitz where a "doctor" decided he could go to the line that was sent to a shower dispensing water, not gas.
This book reminded me of another book that was equally difficult reading because of its emotional impact, another story told as a simple narration of terrible conditions, a book without any real plot, just like Fatelessness. The book is George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London." This was a book that left me profoundly grateful for having a comfortable place to sleep at night and enough food to eat every day.
Imre Kertesz' book, like Orwell's, is an achievement in understatement, a simple narrative that lets you decide how you feel about the story. I don't know if Imre Kertesz is my relative, but my grandparents came to America from Hungary in the early years of the Twentieth Century, so they did not have to live through having their homeland taken over by Germans or live behind the "Iron Curtain" under Soviet domination. But I can't help but wonder if any of my relatives who stayed in Hungary suffered like the boy in this story, and I am grateful that my grandparents, John and Mary Kertesz, came to America.
Summary of Fatelessness
At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn't particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, "You are no Jew." In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.The genius of Imre Kertesz's unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg's dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses-or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.
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