Auschwitz painted in shades of gray

When the first of Primo Levi’s great works came out in America, the publishers changed its title from the spaciously suggestive “If This Is a Man” to the reductive “Survival in Auschwitz.” The title would better have suited “Fatelessness,” the chill cornerstone novel of the Hungarian Imre Kertesz, also a concentration camp survivor and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in literature.

Levi, who never won it, struggled in his books to suggest the astonishments residing in the human spirit: worn down in a hundred ways by the horrors of the camps, broken, destroyed sometimes, yet obstinately winking out the value of what was destroyed. He wrote in chiaroscuro: His bits of light dazzle by force of the darkness around them, and the darkness shows darker because of the lights.

Kertesz, through the youthful narrator of “Fatelessness” (also largely autobiographical), dismisses the notion of darkness and summons no light. His Auschwitz and Buchenwald are a purposeful penumbra.

Yet this novel and its successors, “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” and “Liquidation,” are darker in fact than anything Levi wrote. They are not a judgment on the camps but on the human spirit. It is a spirit by turns sardonic, watchful and in the last two novels bitterly despairing, and one that has never known the largeness that Levi saw even as the spirit slipped away from him.

Kertesz was quite unknown here when he won his prize; even in Europe he was read principally in Sweden and Germany. Now “Fatelessness” and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” are being published in paperback by Vintage, and “Liquidation,” a new novel, is out in hardcover from Knopf. All three are translated by Tim Wilkinson. The first two had been issued several years ago by Northwestern University Press in another translation and widely ignored.

All deal with the camps but in very different ways. “Fatelessness” is a realistic first-person account of a 14-year-old Budapest Jew sent first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald and one of its outlying labor camps. Its tone is dry; it does not so much move as startle. The startlement doesn’t lie in a retailing of horrors -- the few Germans in sight are almost abstract -- but in the blocking-out that goes on in the boy’s mind.

Brought up among the bourgeois values of pre-war Central Europe, his impulse is to conform to whatever authority rules. At home, when he ran, he was careful to keep his lapel from blowing across the obligatory yellow star. In the fetid boxcar, he reasons that you can go six days without water if you avoid spicy food.

At Auschwitz he approves the orderliness of the arrival and is proud to be declared fit to work. The long lines of the unfit, old or under-aged (he pretends he is 16) are quietly marched off by guards who carry whips but aren’t seen to use them. Matter-of-factly he records the incessant smoke from the crematoriums and the whispered report that those chosen for work take real showers, while the showers for the others emit gas.

He gives a meticulous account of his survival, of the need to seize on the better times -- an evening rest period, an occasional half-pound instead of a one-third-pound bread ration -- and then the ebbing of strength and will as work increases and food grows even scantier. A long hospitalization saves him; the doctors and orderlies, themselves prisoners, are conscientious and cadge extra food for the patients.

Then, when the camp is liberated, he struggles to define his experience to a journalist back in Budapest. Was it hell? He didn’t know hell, he only knew the camp.

It was “a place where it is impossible to become bored.” Why? “Time helps.” Why? Because it was necessary to take things hour by hour, day by difficult day. If the prisoners’ entire stay “had been dumped round their necks instantaneously, at a stroke, most likely they too would have been unable to stand it.”

Impossible to imagine, the journalist says. The narrator: “[S]o, that must be why they prefer to talk about hell instead.” And later: “Even in the camps there was happiness.” On one golden evening he even feels nostalgia. It is scandalous; it is impossible not to believe. And thus the Kertesz darkness.

Darkness floods out the last two novels. In “Kaddish,” ironic realism gives way to choking monologue. The speaker, a writer somewhat resembling the author, reverses the voice in “Fatelessness.” Instead of orderliness as a step-by-step way to get through Auschwitz without noticing too much, here there is nothing but noticing, and it blinds.

Auschwitz contaminates all life: that which preceded it, that which follows. “No!” is the book’s first word -- a refusal to have a child -- and it roils out to negate everything. Work remains because “if I were not working I would be existing.”

There is power in “Kaddish.” Even though the monologist tends to withdraw into convoluted oratory, he emerges with whiplash cogency. He scorns the cliche that there is no explanation for Auschwitz. It would imply, since everything that exists has an explanation, that Auschwitz doesn’t exist. So it’s truer -- and most terrible -- to say: “No explanation for the absence of Auschwitz.”

The same theme shapes “Liquidation,” but it is crippled by a mannered attempt to work it into an expressionist hybrid of novel and play. Both books bear the limitation of Kertesz’s extreme despair: so unalloyed that its elaborately stylized intensity all but stifles feeling.

Levi knew it took light to make out darkness; Kertesz’s darkness, uncontrasted, dilates our pupils until we see gray. Levi, aging, killed himself. Aging, Kertesz’s characters verge on suicide or commit it. Their creator, so interviewers write, remains a cheerful man. A manner, perhaps.

Still, an artist anchored in a world of horrors while stretching unimaginably toward humane belief incurs a rending, even lethal risk. Elaborating the horrors, however artistically, could imply a perhaps safer remove. *