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| Imre Kertész |
Speaking on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Kertész remembered arriving in the camps as a 15-year-old.
"Ninety percent of the Hungarian Jews had no clue about the concentration camps....On arrival, we still didn't understand anything. Even the adults didn't understand. They had absolutely no idea what would happen. Not at any time during the selection process did they understand what the doctor was doing to them. Only around evening time did it become clear that the smokestacks did not belong to a tannery, as we all thought, and the sweetish smell in the air was not from leather. On the first evening, it was clear to me that people were burning in these chimneys, people with whom I had eaten in the train," Kertész said.
Asked how one survives a concentration camp, Kertész mentioned religious belief and political hope, as well as a lack of both.
"There were religious Jews that left themselves to faith: What God does is always good, and this belief gave them strength. Then there were the political prisoners who also had a kind of hope that their struggle was not for naught. In the most hopeless situation were those who did not believe in anything, who had no hope at all."
Kertész said he was one of the latter, with "neither belief nor hope".
"I did what one had to do, I conformed to this death machine. It isn't easy to speak about it, because conforming also means collaboration. Whoever conforms in the camp, whoever understands the logic of the death machine and bends to it collaborates with the devil - that is exactly what I did. But one does not say this gladly."
Asked to elaborate on this "collaboration", Kertész offered an example.
"On one morning the rule was never be the first, never stand in front! But there were new rules on every day and for every situation. Once, a man wanted to steal my shovel as he had obviously lost his own. He hit me like mad on the hand and I was bleeding heavily, but I would not give it to him. To lose a shovel meant death. If you accept the death of another to rescue yourself, then you collaborate with the devil. There are a hundred such stories."
Kertész said it was not uncomfortable to speak about his experiences in the camps, but it was "fruitless".
"Experiences in Auschwitz are so far from our civilized lives and so unbelievable that one can not imagine them....The facts are there, that is history, with which experts involve themselves. One can mention that Poland was occupied and that a camp was established in Auschwitz. On can mention the number of the dead. But can one imagine the life of camp commandant Rudolf Höss? Who went home like a bureaucrat in the evening to his wife and child and listened to music, perhaps Schubert, perhaps Beethoven? No, we cannot imagine that, because we cannot make a connection between this and our real lives today. It is a closed world, and the results that came about were so, so, so...you see, I struggle for the words. There is no adjective for Auschwitz."
Kertész said he could personally say nothing about the Holocaust, rather only as a writer.
"I can invent an art form, a language, I can create a figure that says something instead of me. Auschwitz is a wonderful topic for a novel. That I have seen the devil of the20 th century, and very closely at that, that is a benefit for me as a writer. Because I know what nobody other than myself can know. And I did not write about the Holocaust...rather about fatelessness."
Asked to comment on films that deal with the Holocaust - he called Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful "wonderful", but said Spielberg's Schindler's List was "the worst film of all" - Kertész noted that Holocaust experiences are "universal experiences".
"The Holocaust is not a war between Germans in Jews....the Holocaust is a universal failure of civilizing values, and for a long time I thought we learned something from that. But I was wrong."
After he was freed from the camps, Kertész returned to Hungary in 1945. But a "total communist dictatorship" was established shortly afterward, in 1948 and 1949.
Asked why he did not leave the country, as did more than 200,000 Hungarians, after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was crushed by the Soviets, Kertész said it was because of the language.
"I was 27 years old, and I had decided to write. I had only this one language, Hungarian, and it was clear to me that I would not find a new language with which I could express myself."
Kertész described his life in Hungary under the dictatorship as "terrible".
"I was shut up in a 28-square-metre apartment. Hungary was called the 'happiest barracks in the socialist camp' or 'goulash communism', both concepts are terrible minimizations. In truth, it was a prison. János Kádár, the general secretary, a type of father figure for many, was a perfidious mass murderer who had many people executed after 1956. The entire Hungarian society, naturally with exceptions, adapted. I took this in so consciously and clearly because I had experienced this adaptation already in Auschwitz. I could first experience the final picture of a totalitarian system in Hungary, under the Kádár regime....Dictatorship liberates people. It abrogates the individual....Totalitarianism means an infantilized society."
Asked if he feared death, Kertész said yes. "But I bring my fear to the surface and write about it. What I am afraid of is that death will come suddenly, without sign or consolation. This thought makes me angry, perhaps I still want to write another book, but death comes and takes me. The composer Béla Bartók said on his deathbed, 'I'm going, but my suitcase is still full.' [My suitcase] is more than full."
Source: Der Standard / Hungarian News Agency (MTI) / Photo: epa
