Dossier K: A Memoir (7 page)

How did you come to be at the Shell Oil refinery in the summer of 1944?

In what I might call a quite natural way. I presume you know a bit about the Levente movement.
¹⁰
Anyway, at the start of the 1943–44 grammar school year—I was thirteen and in Year 3 then—that still appeared to be just some stupid phooey. Once a week we had to line up in the schoolyard under the supervision of Csorba, the gym teacher whom I mentioned earlier. On these occasions, the boys of stream B received what I may safely call an introductory course to Auschwitz. Not that it was called that, of course, and I dare say that even gym master Csorba was not fully aware of the reality, although he needed to do no more than think through where the logic of his activity was leading to. Allow me at this point to wheel out my favourite Kafka quotation,
a sentence from
The Trial: “Judgment does not come suddenly; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.”
The system of terror in Germany was forceful, whereas in Hungary—even before the German occupation in early 1944—it was simply unpredictable. But the
proceedings
had already started and were steadily moving ahead along the designated route. For the Levente lesson, a B-stream pupil would slip on a yellow arm band that his mother (or auntie or the chambermaid) had sewed for him at home and learned that he was to be addressed as “Master Ancillary Trainee,” which he would then discuss in guffaws with his companions as the expression was incomprehensible and truly ridiculous. On these occasions gym teacher Csorba would strut around in some sort of officer’s cap: “Trainee Corps, fall in!” he would bawl. The Levente lessons had to be taken seriously because they were compulsory. In Hungary under the German occupation, however, after the schools were closed early for the summer vacation, every “Master” over fourteen who was liable to do Levente service had to possess an officially verified workplace. I had received from the borough council a communication to the effect that I could either pick such a workplace for myself or they would assign one. I elected for the latter and obtained the Shell Oil refinery, and the rest you know. I hope I’m not expected to go over again the story of how I was picked up by the police, the gendarmes, the brickyard …

That is the story of the year that we know about from
Fatelessness.

Maybe we should pick up again on our chat regarding the distinction between fiction and an autobiographical novel …

I wouldn’t set my heart on it. There’s just one question that I would like to ask, but that one in any case. How should I put it, then? To what extent does György Köves resemble the person who you were? To continue that line of thought: to what extent were you, Imre Kertész, helped to survive, or to what extent was it made more difficult, by your sad childhood, that alienated way of life, lacking in all intimacy, on which some light has been thrown by our conversation so far?

A good question, and one it is worth contemplating, although I feel it is something I have always been thinking about. The question reminds me of one of Jean Améry’s essays, in which he broods on whether culture, or education, was of any assistance to intellectuals in Auschwitz. He comes to the conclusion that it wasn’t; indeed, educated people had a harder time of it in the death camps than did ordinary, uneducated people. Now that may well be true in practice, but—being in possession of that culture—if one thinks a bit more profoundly about Auschwitz, about the establishment and running of the death camp, then one has to concede the necessity of those institutions. Yes, indeed, if you consider one line taken by European history and analyze it with your post-facto knowledge of the way in which, for centuries now, mankind has been thinking and acting, the way in which he has been living, then the setting-up of the
machinery for the extermination of European Jewry is no big surprise.

You mean Auschwitz is an inevitable and logical consequence of
 …

No, I don’t mean that: Where Auschwitz starts logic stops. What comes to the fore is a kind of compulsive thought process that is very similar to logic because it leads people, only not on the path of logic. Now, I look for that thread, that aberrant train of thought that coercively passes absurdity off as logic, because once one is in the trap of Auschwitz there is no choice. More than that, we get a rehearsal in the way of thinking by life itself, in which of course we take an active part.

Is that what you mean when in
Fiasco (
and also
Kaddish)
you write: “I was a modestly diligent, if not always impeccably proficient accomplice to the unspoken conspiracy against my life”?

Precisely. I don’t know when it first occurred to me that there had to be a terrible mistake, a diabolical irony, at work in the world order that you experience as part of normal ordinary life, and that terrible mistake is culture itself, the belief system, the language and the concepts that conceal from you that you have long been a well-oiled component of the machinery that has been set up for your own destruction. The secret of survival is collaboration, but to admit that is to bring such shame down on you that you prefer to repudiate rather than accept
it. Let’s not discuss that right now, however, but the fact remains that when I grasped it, my whole way of looking at things changed. I was able to imagine the language, being, and even frame of thinking of the character in a novel as a fiction, but I was no longer able to become one with him; or rather what I mean to say is that while creating the character, I forgot myself, and for that reason I am unable to give an answer to your original question as to the extent to which the novel character resembles the former me. Plainly, it more closely resembles the person who wrote it than the one who experienced it, and from my own point of view it’s very lucky that that is the way it worked out.

Because in this way it released you from nightmarish memories?

Yes, that’s right. I was able to slip out of my own skin, as it were, and pull on another one without having to discard the previous one, or in other words, without betraying my experiences.

We shall be jumping a couple of decades ahead, but I feel that this is the place to remind you of an interview you gave in 2003 in which you asserted that you had written
Fatelessness
about the Kádár regime, which provoked a huge debate. There were more than a few people who declared that you had betrayed the Holocaust
.

And the debate was just as uninformed and half-baked as the unscrupulous employment of the word “Holocaust.”
People don’t care to call what actually happened by its proper name—“The Destruction of Europe’s Jews,” as Raul Hilberg entitled his great work—but instead they have found a word whose true meaning they admittedly don’t understand, but they have established this ritual and, by now, ossified and immovable place for it among our notions and they defend it like watch dogs. They bark at anyone who approaches to adjust anything about it. I never called
Fatelessness
a Holocaust novel like others do, because what they call “the Holocaust” cannot be put into a novel. I wrote about a state, and although it’s true the novel attempts to shape the unspeakable ordeal of the death camps into a human experience, it was nevertheless concerned primarily with the ethical consequences of
subsistence
and
survival
. That was why I picked the title
Fatelessness
. The ordeal of the death camps becomes a human experience where I come across the universality of the ordeal, and that is fatelessness, that specific aspect of dictatorships, the expropriation, nationalization of one’s own fate, turning it into a mass fate, the stripping away of a human being’s most human essence. The novel came into being during the Sixties and early Seventies, and what novel does not bear the imprint of its age, its language, its frame of reference, and so on? How could people imagine that the Kádár era was not a dictatorship? It was, the very pick of dictatorships, yet after Auschwitz the virtuality of Auschwitz inheres in every dictatorship. It is only among the obsessions of Hungarian politics that recognizing and admitting this fact could be counted scandalous. In saying that I am not going as far as to assert that the Holocaust was like the Kádár regime; all I have said is that it was
under the Kádár regime that I clearly understood my Auschwitz ordeals, and I would never have come to understand them if I had grown up in a democracy. And I have already said that a hundred times, comparing the strength of memory to Proust’s
petites madeleines
, the unexpected taste of which revived the past for him. For me the
petite madeleine
was the Kádár era, and it revived the tastes of Auschwitz.

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.