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Survivor's inner struggle dominates Holocaust novel by Nobel Prize winner

Sunday, November 03, 2002

By John Freeman

It seems an especially cruel twist of fate that several of the best Holocaust narratives did not see print until many survivors were dead.

Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, this year's Nobel Prize winner for literature, published his profoundly affecting first novel in 1975.

However, it wasn't until 1992, almost 50 years after Kertesz was liberated from Buchenwald, that the book found its way into the English language. It's hard not to hope the award finally brings him wider readership.

	Fateless By Imre Kertesz, translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson Hydra Books, Northwestern University Press ($14.95)

Like the best Holocaust literature, the novel not only transports a reader inside daily life in the camps, but it re-creates how these experiences warped the minds of those who survived them.

As the novel opens, 14-year-old George Kovos' father has been conscripted into labor camps. According to his aunts and uncles, George will now be the man of the family, yet only a few days later, he, too, is rounded up and sent to a camp himself.

What follows is a fascinating study of how the human mind can adapt to even the most horrific of scenarios.

At first, George and his boys are happy, and play games. The longer the wait, however, the bigger their group gets. Old men arrive and stand around worriedly, scheming and talking, some trying to bribe guards out of what they surely know is an ominous fate.

Kertesz masterfully portrays George's innocence at this stage, his willingness to believe that all was for the best. Once they arrive at Auschwitz, however, it becomes harder to understand their fate; George and his compatriots are sorted into the sick and healthy, stripped of their valuables, shaved of their body hair, given prison uniforms and made to work.

Information arrives in drips and drabs, each one dampening an earlier, more optimistic explanation for the prevalence of smokestacks and the sudden disappearance of friends or family.

And yet George continues to keep his focus on small matters -- when the meals are served and what tools he uses -- forcing the reader to feel the outrage he does not, or cannot, express.

As if by fluke reward for his acceptance of his fate, George is shipped first to Buchenwald, and then out of the camps. His return home, however, is anything but joyous. Angry glances magnify his guilt over surviving. His family wants him to speak of the hell of the camps, to document thehorrors they've heard whispered about.

And yet, for George, they were merely an extension of life, where conformity is valued above all else. "Do you want all this horror and all my previous steps to lose their meaning entirely," he cries out to his family. "Why can't you see that if there is such a thing as fate, then there is no freedom?"

Refusing to fit into their cliche, George must cope with his memories alone, the same way, Kertesz suggests, we all must spend are own precious days.

John Freeman is a freelance writer in New York.

Sunday, November 03, 2002