Imre Kertesz, Nobel Literature Laureate And Holocaust Survivor, Passes Away At 86

Imre Kertesz, an author who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002 and who survive both Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps under Hiter’s Nazi regime as a teen, has died. He was 86-years-old.

Imre Kertesz was just 14-years-old in 1944 when, while on his way to school one day, Hungarian police caught him and shipped him off to Auschwitz. A year later, he was moved to Buchenwald. He wrote of his time in Hitler’s concentration camps in many of his novels, most famously his 1975 debut semi-autobiographical book Fateless, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize nearly three decades after its initial publication.

#ImreKertesz, the first writer from #Hungary to win the Nobel Prize, has died https://t.co/jQo33cQUuA pic.twitter.com/YVypCe7N7T

— Telegraph Books (@TelegraphBooks) March 31, 2016

According to the New York Times, though Kertesz had often told both readers and critics that they shouldn’t automatically assume that his novel Fateless was autobiographical, there are striking similarities between his own experiences of the death camps and those of Gyuri Koves, the novel’s protagonist. Both Kertesz and Koves were 14-years-old when the events leading up to their Auschwitz internment happened, both were caught by Hungarian police on their way to school and sent to the camps, both Kertesz and his fictional counterpart spent time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and both were convinced by other camp inmates to lie and say they were a 16-year-old worker rather than a 14-year-old student. This qualified them for forced hard labour with the adults rather than immediate extermination like the other children.

When Imre Kertesz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002, the Swedish Nobel Academy said that he won for “writing that upholds the experience of the individual in the face of a barbaric and arbitrary history.”

The Novel uses the alienating device of taking the reality of the camp completely for granted, an every day existence like any other. [Kertesz] is one of the few people who manages to describe that in a way which is immediately accessible to us, those who have not shared that experience.”

Following his Nobel Prize win, Imre Kertesz did an interview with Newsweek in which he described the overwhelming feelings he experienced while in the camps, where he had his “most radical moments of happiness.”

“I experienced my most radical moments of happiness in the concentration camp. You cannot imagine what it’s like to be allowed to lie in the camp’s hospital, or to have a 10-minute break from indescribable labor. To be very close to death is also a kind of happiness. Just surviving becomes the greatest freedom of all.”

The Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz has died. He depicted life in death camps without outrage https://t.co/gADYJmLNTs pic.twitter.com/QlwLjywtwc

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 31, 2016

After the war, the future Nobel Laureate returned to Hungary to find it occupied by the Soviet Red Army. He worked as a journalist for a Budapest newspaper for a time, but ultimately lost his job in 1951, when he refused to glorify the country’s new Communist regime, reports the Guardian. Kertesz began working on Fateless in 1960, finally finishing it 13 years later, in 1973. However, it wouldn’t be published until 1975, having been initially rejected by Hungary’s Communist government.

Imre Kertesz was born in Budapest, Hungary, on November 9, 1929, to secular Jewish parents. He grew up a non-observant Jew but once said in a 2001 interview that his internment in the Nazi death camps had “obliged [him] to be Jewish.”

“I accept it, but to a large extent it is also true that it was imposed on me.”

Earlier this month, a selection of Kertesz’s diary entries were published in Hungary, entitled The Viewer. Despite being very ill at the time, Kertesz helped to prepare the book, which features a decade of diary entries, from 1991 to 2001.

Imre Kertesz, the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, passed away at 86-years-old after suffering from debilitating Parkinson’s disease for several years. He was the first person from Hungary to received the Nobel Prize for literature. Imre Kertesz is survived by his second wife, Magda.

[Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images]