If you would permit me to make a comment: you also use the word “Auschwitz” in an augmented sense, so what is your objection to the word “Holocaust”?
It is an instinctive objection. I found the perfect formulation in the book Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben: “The unfortunate term ‘holocaust’ (usually with a capital ‘H’) arises from this unconscious demand to justify a death that is sine causa—to give some meaning back to what seemed incomprehensible.” He also goes into the etymology of the word, the essence of which is that the original word, the classical Greek holókau(s)tos, was originally an adjective meaning “totally burnt”; the history of the word’s denotation then leads into the vocabulary of the Fathers of the early Christian Church, which we might do well to avoid here. As far as I’m concerned, I use the word because it has been made unavoidable, but I take it for what it is: a euphemism, a cowardly and unimaginative glibness.
And given its derivation, the word actually only relates to those who were incinerated: the dead, but not the survivors.
That’s right. The survivor is an exception; his existence—really the result of an industrial accident in the machinery of death, as Jean Améry so aptly remarked. Maybe that is one of the reasons it is so hard to accept, to come to terms with the exceptional and anomalous existence that survival stands for.
Yet that is not the way you saw it in the concentration camp. May I remind you of what you said about trust: it was this trust that helped you in the end to escape.
That’s another perspective. Trust existed, but so too did the interplay of fortuitous circumstances, that even now I would not dare to dwell upon because it conceals a dreadful temptation …
The temptation of faith, of providence …
Of explanations—explanations of any sort. I can’t remember offhand which author records it, but on his arrival at Auschwitz he asks an SS guard “Why?” and the soldier replies “Hier ist kein warum—there is no why here …”
It crops up in Primo Levi’s memoir If This Is a Man. Please excuse me, but I need to push you on those whys now all the same.
I hope that I can’t answer your questions, for if I could that would be as much as to say that I had grasped something that goes beyond the mind’s limits. Although, on the other hand, the mind is there for us to try and use it.
Does that mean to say that I may pose my questions?
Go on, then.
In Galley Boat-Log you remark that it wasn’t easy to fit the sheer fact of survival into Fatelessness in such a way that it did not violate the novel’s clear and logical composition. In other words, no obstruction of any kind is raised to the linearity of the plot right down to—and I’m using your own ghastly word—the human “debris” in Buchenwald, but the “novelistic” turning point caused you problems. We probably ought to speak some more about that, but would you care to say anything now about how much was fact and how much fiction in that particular series of events?
Fortunately, I can’t answer your question. The series of events conforms to reality. I did lie on a concrete floor, someone did step up to me and cursorily check my reflexes, then take me on his shoulder, and after that everything happened as I describe it. But that in itself already seems beyond the bounds of the credible; even though that is how it happened, I am unable to interpret what happened as reality, only as fiction. The shift from reality to fiction occurred, as I said, when I made a start on the novel. Up till that point the facts—the reality as you would put it—rested mutely within me like a dawn dream that is washed away by the ring of the alarm clock. That reality only becomes problematic if you analyze it, or in other words if you attempt to bring it out of the gloom: that is when you immediately realize its impossibility. And by the way, don’t think I didn’t try to uncover the actual background to that series of events. I was most curious about the reality that lay behind the Revier, or infirmary, with the eiderdown beds; in other words, how it was possible that in the heart of Buchenwald concentration camp there could be a hospital in which the patients were able to lie in separate beds with bedclothes and could receive genuine medical treatment. In the late 1990s I made the acquaintance of Dr. Volkhard Knigge, the sterling chap who runs the Buchenwald memorial. Using my description of the experience as a foothold, all I could say about the room in which I lay was that it had been called “Saal Sechs,” or Ward Six. For all our poring over files, facts, and the material to hand, we were unable to unearth any trace of such an institution. We did, however, come across one indirect sign of its existence, for in the roll of Buchenwald prisoners there is a record of an “efflux” to the effect that “Kertész Imre, Hungarian Jewish prisoner No. 64921” died on February 18th, 1945. That was indisputable evidence that somebody or several somebodies had deleted me from the camp roll list to preclude my being killed as a Jewish prisoner in the event that the camp were to be liquidated. Anyone who knows even a little bit about the administrative structure of the concentration camps will know that tacit cooperation on the part of several people would be required in order to make an entry like that possible. That trace made me even more curious, but I had to resign myself to the fact that what I had experienced exists in my brain alone, in the form of a dreamlike memory. In the winter of 2002, though, while I was in Stockholm, someone telephoned the hotel from Australia—an elderly gentleman by the name of Kucharski, who had been reading this novel by the latest Nobel laureate and in it, to his great excitement, he had come across himself: he had been in the bunk above mine in the Revier with the eiderdown beds, and indeed is mentioned by name in the novel. It goes without saying how happy that unexpected call made me; the one drawback being that he spoke only English and Polish, so we had great difficulty in understanding each other, because I don’t know a word of Polish and I have only a rudimentary grasp of English. So, the conversation fizzled out somewhere between the two continents, leaving me with the memory of an all-but-transcendental message. Later, Mr. Kucharski’s son visited me in Berlin: he has a few snaps taken of himself with me but he was unable to supply any information.
An intriguing story …
Intriguing as intriguing goes; it’s just that I could have gone crazy if I couldn’t have drawn on it as fiction. As it was, it fitted in superbly with the novel’s improbable reality: György Köves can attribute his escape to an incomprehensible absurdity in the same way that the cause of his death would have been an incomprehensible absurdity. An explanation can be found for both cases, but those explanations call for further explanations and so on ad infinitum, back to the start of history or the Creation, if you will. As for me, the person who lived through it all yet used the experiences as the raw material for a novel—I am able to vanish nicely and comfortably between fiction and the facts that are called reality.
And tread on toward the next novel.
Yes, with the feeling that I may have written a novel but I have solved nothing. The riddle of the world has remained just as tormenting a thorn as it was before.
I know you are reluctant to speak about your camp experiences, but you mentioned just before that the alteration of your record card in Buchenwald would have called for the covert collaboration of several individuals. Who might those individuals have been?
I don’t think there’s much point in spending much time on the structure of Buchenwald camp. Look, every concentration camp was different from all the others—such was the “univers concentrationaire.” From a certain point of view (but certainly not mine), Buchenwald in 1944–45 was one of the “less rigorous” camps. That was a result of the ruthless battle that the “red triangle” political prisoners had fought for many years against the “green triangle” criminals. It was a matter of who controlled the internal administration of the camp. The internal administration in its entirety was run by the prisoners, so the ones who had charge of the administration held the power. Since the “red triangle” prisoners were generally more intelligent, more astute, and bett
er organized than the “greens,” they gradually gained control of the office that handled job allocation and the transports, and in that way they slowly managed to free themselves of the criminal elements by channelling them to auxiliary camps, allocating them to Commandos doing the most unpleasant work—but maybe it’s better I don’t go into the details. As a result, though, the political prisoners were able to do, and indeed did, quite a lot above all for the children, for whom otherwise certain death would have waited in the typhus-ridden barracks of the so-called Little Camp that was opened for the anonymous masses of Hungarian Jews in 1944. The long arm of the politicals probably reached as far as the ramp, where they tried to fish out and salvage to relative safety a few lucky devils among the human debris of the transports.
So there is a rational explanation, after all, for the process that seemed so irrational to you at the time.
Even today it seems every bit as irrational, because if I try to accept the rationality of the whole process that in the early winter of 1944–45 landed me, half-dead, in an icy puddle on the concrete of a Buchenwald unloading bay, there is still no way that I can consider it rational that I, of all people, and not someone else should have been rescued from there. If I were to accept that as being rational, I would also have to accept the notion of providence. But then if providence is rationality, why did it not extend to the six million others who died there?
Nobody can accuse you of ducking awkward questions, as indeed is already very clear from your published work. But tell me, how can you live facing those questions?
Like a gambler. I like playing for big stakes, and I am quite ready to lose it all at any second. As we must all die, we have the right—even a duty—to think boldly.
There are quite a lot of people who would say that your way of thinking is pessimistic.
I don’t know what that means: I wouldn’t call dodging the ultimate questions optimism but plain cowardice. I can understand it, but an optimist has to die just as much as a pessimist. Whether we yield to death blindly or confront it head-on doesn’t matter in practice. I would prefer to confront it head-on because to me that signifies a fuller life; ultimately it gives me more pleasure. You could say I am a hedonist.
Not a moralist?
No way! The age of the great moralists—of Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, and so on—has long passed. Since Auschwitz it has become redundant to make any judgments about human nature. The way of the moralist nowadays leads straight to mass movements, and that is more than a little problematic, besides which it is boring. But leave them be: let them believe that there is such a thing as a just dictatorship without death camps, where everyone is obliged to be happy. To my way of thinking happiness means something else—that’s all there is to it.
What about justice?
Truth is no longer universal—that’s a grave fact, but it must be acknowledged. Standing up for oneself: that’s the hardest, it always was. That’s precisely what the moralist runs from. Our era does not favour the preservation of the individual; it is simpler to surrender ourselves to salvational ideas than stick to our own unique and irreproducible existence, to choose our own truth rather than the truth. But let’s not get into this.
Let’s carry on with the chronicle. What is your memory of your liberation?
I described it in Fatelessness. Those were heady days for us. Every day the order would be given out that Jews were to assemble on the Appellplatz. Death marches set off from the camp to other camps that lay further afield. Every night there was an air raid, and along with the bombs we were able to pick out approaching artillery fire. Over the last few days SS boots thudded on Lager thoroughfares, rifle shots were audible. Finally, around noon one day, the order was bellowed from the loudspeakers that all SS personnel were to leave the camp, “without delay.” A few hours later the roar of General Patton’s victorious tanks could be heard in the distance. By that night a Hershey bar and a Lucky Strike cigarette had flown onto every bed; in the kitchens the cooks were preparing a thick goulash. We greedily tucked the soup down, but ingesting the heavy food was deadly for more than a few. That was April 11th. The date was murmured at every hand. The loudspeakers, which up till then had relayed the orders of the SS, were switched to the BBC radio broadcasts, which gave news about the liberation of a Buchenwald concentration camp that lay close to the city of Weimar. It was strange to be in Buchenwald listening to the emotional and astonished reports that were made about Buchenwald. It was strange to return of the world of humankind. The rest is just anecdotal.
In Fatelessness György Köves rings the doorbell to the Fleischmanns’ home and demands to have his fate given back to him.
That’s right. There’s no denying that I too rang some doorbell, but I wouldn’t swear that my one-time neighbours really were called Fleischmann and Steiner. At the home in Baross Street someone else opened the door: that was the overture to the reality that I had returned to a changed world, but the experience of seeing a stranger at the door instead of my father or stepmother was like a seismic tremor at the time.
Why did you return to Baross Street rather than to Zivatar Street?
When I went away, Baross Street was the status quo, and when I got home I had no way of knowing that my father had died.
True, in the novel that’s something you learn from old Fleischmann and Steiner.
Köves learns, though as it happened I too was informed of that by the strangers who were living in the house.
And that important conversation with the two old codgers?
Pure fiction, though it’s possible we really did talk about something of the kind. As I have said already, the figure of György Köves more closely resembles the person who wrote the novel than the person who actually lived through it. For the person who wrote the novel the situation was important, the cathartic moment when Köves doesn’t just realize but is able to interpret his fate, and in the novel this had to occur in the novelistic time and place that happen to be in the presence of the two old codgers.
I have every respect for your detachment, and the fact that you manifestly prefer to hide behind your novel character rather than tell me what exactly happened to you in those days immediately following your return home to Hungary. Yet as you yourself have already pointed out, the world must have altered profoundly for you.
It is precisely those first days that I have little recollection of; all that’s stayed with me are fleeting impressions. When I stepped out of the Western Railway Terminal onto what was then Berlin (later Marx and now Western) Square the sun was dazzling, and a loudspeaker at the stop for the Number 6 tram was blaring out the hit tune “You’re the Light in the Night.” Next to me there was a fairly well-dressed man who was offering “corn cakes” from a tray slung round his neck. I remember the news vendors, or hawkers as they were called, who would yell out newspaper titles or headlines that one could never make out. Those first days in general were ablaze with sunlight; it was summer. I was going around in a foreign world where I had suddenly caught a whiff of freedom, especially on the streets. At home people talked about sombre matters, took stock of their losses and weighed up the uncertain future that lay ahead. I couldn’t pay much heed to that. I recall the office of the Budapest-Salgótarján Engineering Works where I took my mother by surprise. Her female colleagues, whom I knew myself from the earlier days, all rushed out to hug me and were deeply moved. The news that I had “come home from the Lager” spread, and I was asked all manner of stupid questions. I would wake up at night tormented by an unbearable itching. I would switch on the light, convinced that lice were crawling over me, but they weren’t: my body was covered with red spots, I had an allergy of some kind. Mother took me to see the works doctor—a Dr. Bock, as I recollect to this day. He advised injections of calcium, and I was greatly moved when he took hold of my arm and carefully inserted the syringe in my vein: I had grown totally unused to people treating me that way. In short, I was ringed on all sides by surprises until everyday life was slowly r
estored.
How did the news of your father’s death take you?
You’re asking me an impossible question and forcing me to resort to banalities.
Perhaps, but I’m still interested.
You may be right. It may be worth considering how my life might have worked out if I had stayed with my father.
Well, how?
Just the same, I suppose, only at the price of yet more grueling fights. Father would obviously have insisted that I take on a “respectable” occupation of some kind, whereas I would have slipped back in a psychosis of permanent rebellion. But if I think about it more carefully, it’s possible that I did that anyway, except that I continued my fight against Father without him, which in the absence of his robust presence led to a transcendence. Like an arrow that misses its immediate target and vanishes into the distance.