Hungarian Holocaust Survivor Is Awarded Nobel in Literature

Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, a survivor of Auschwitz who made the experience of the Holocaust a central theme of his work, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday.

In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy singled out Kertesz’s 1975 debut novel, “Fateless,” the semiautobiographical story of a boy sent to Nazi concentration camps who conforms and survives--partly by developing an extraordinary detachment from what is happening to him. In the novel, the terrifying reality of the camps is taken for granted, as a given of the hero’s situation.

“The shocking credibility of the description derives perhaps from this very absence of any element of the moral indignation or metaphysical protest that the subject cries out for,” the academy said.

Kertesz’s writing also carries a broader symbolism, the academy said, exploring how one can live and think as an individual when people are severely repressed by society. His work “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history,” it said. “For him, Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern experience.”

Speaking to reporters in Berlin, where he is on a fellowship, the 72-year-old prizewinner said he felt “a mixture of surprise and joy.”

“I am interested in totalitarianism, in what a dictatorship can easily do to people, and how does the human being change under it,” Kertesz said. “I didn’t want to write an anti-fascist novel. I just wrote what happened.”

A Jew born in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, Kertesz was deported in 1944 to Auschwitz, the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He later was moved to the Buchenwald camp in Germany, where he was liberated in 1945. About 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

After World War II, Kertesz returned to Hungary. He worked as a journalist beginning in 1948 but was dismissed in 1951 when his paper adopted the Communist Party line. After that, he supported himself as a writer and translator.

In “Fateless,” the hero describes riding a train to Buchenwald under “the usual circumstances of such trips.”

“My body was still there,” the hero explains. “I was thoroughly familiar with it, only somehow I myself no longer lived inside it. Without any difficulty I sensed that my body lay there surrounded on the sides and above with other objects. On the cold floor of the rattling railroad car the straw was wet from a variety of suspicious fluids.

“I sensed that my paper bandages had long since torn apart and disappeared, that my shirt and convict’s pants, which they had put on me for the journey, were sticking to my wounds. But all this no longer moved me, no longer interested me, no longer held any sway over me. Indeed, I have to say that a lot of time had passed since I had experienced this easy, peaceful, and--to call a spade a spade--comfortable quiet.

“After all, I had finally become rid of the pain of irritability: The bodies pressing against mine no longer disturbed me. Somehow I was even glad that they were there with me, that their bodies and mine were so connected and so similar.”

The first Hungarian to win the literature prize, worth about $1 million, Kertesz said he considered it recognition for his years of writing “Holocaust and anti-dictatorship literature.... Maybe this will lead to something educational for the Eastern European states.”

“The Holocaust is a condition that is not finished,” he said. “I feel it everywhere. There hasn’t been a catharsis. One cannot digest the Holocaust.”

But Kertesz, who has spent years translating German literature and philosophy into Hungarian, stressed that he is “not angry at Germany.”

“I’m angry at the Nazis,” he said. “Now there is a third generation that had nothing to do with Nazism.”

German President Johannes Rau congratulated Kertesz, telling him, “I’m deeply moved you have done so much to promote German culture in Hungary in spite of your horrible experience in German concentration camps.”

Hungarian President Ferenc Madl also sent a congratulatory note: “Your life is proof that the soul always has reserves, which we call faith. And it gives strength to all of us.”

“Fateless” was the first of a trilogy reflecting on the Holocaust. In “Fiasco,” published in 1988, an aging author writes a novel about Auschwitz, expecting it to be rejected. To his surprise, it is published, leaving him feeling a sense of emptiness and a loss of privacy.

“Kaddish for a Child Not Born,” published in 1990, is narrated by a middle-aged Holocaust survivor who, like Kertesz, is a writer and literary translator. Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the dead, is said by the protagonist for the child he refuses to beget in the cruel world that allowed Auschwitz to exist.

Receiving the Nobel Prize also gives a boost to plans for Kertesz to help make a film based on “Fateless,” working with Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai.

Kertesz survived the camps because “he had a totally different point of view,” Koltai said. Both the hero of “Fateless” and Kertesz “tried to catch the good moments also; otherwise, you can’t get through,” he explained, citing as examples the beauty of sunsets and the smell of soup.

Kertesz “is always showing the small people against the power,” Koltai said.

The author, he added, explores the question “How can you be a human being in silence--inside yourself--against the power that’s stepping over you?”

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Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin and special correspondent Palma Melis in Budapest contributed to this report.