Fateless

Fateless is a novel by Imre Kertesz, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature. It was about a Jewish boy from Budapest who is sent to a concentration camp (Kertesz, too, was a Hungarian Jew sent to a concentration camp) and was a gift to me from Elizabeth Bennett, so I brought it along on my summer travels.

This telling of life in a concentration camp is different from many other tellings that I've read. Kertesz takes you with the narrator upon his entrance into the camp. He is completely unsuspecting--until the last moment, when the narrator, who has committed no crime, is put in the uniform of a criminal, his sympathies are with the German captors and against the other men dressed as criminals.

The narrator is ethnically but not religiously Jewish. This puts him in a position all alone. He wonders, before he is taken to the concentration camp, if seeing Jewish people as something special, apart from other people, is the opposite of seeing them as something terrible to be destroyed. Here, the implication is that the Jewish people are first people.

At the end of the novel, the narrator returns to Budapest after being liberated from the concentration camp. The response of people he meets is to want to see the evil of the concentration camp as unrepeatable and bizarre. They want to forget it. The narrator's response, however, is that for one who lived through the experience of a concentration camp, it can never be forgotten. Rather, it goes with you through life. Healing from that experience can only happen over time (just as the terrors of the experience itself happened in time).

At the moment, I'm reading Hannah Arendt's Jewish writings--her position is quite similar to Kertesz's: First of all, she maintains that the Jewish people must be understood to be the same as all other peoples (this is not to deny the existence of differences in their history, but the Jewish people, like any other people needs a space for politics). Second, Arendt emphasizes the importance of action--the Jewish people needs to be able to act in order to be really free. This is quite similar to the action at the end of Fateless: the narrator returns realizing that liberation is not enough. Now the liberated people need to act in order to be really free (an action that does not forget what has happened).

Where Arendt and Kertesz diverge is in Arendt's emphasis on the Jewish people as a whole: she writes that if you are attacked as a Jew, you need to respond as a Jew. It is not enough to respond as a Jewish person living in France or Poland, or Hungary, for that matter. The identity of the Jewish people as a whole is of supreme importance to her; this is something that is not present in Kertesz's work (although Kertesz's narrator was, like Arendt, not Jewish in terms of religious practice).