Jan 4, 2006
The Holocaust, From a Teenage View
Sixty years ago, Imre Kertész emerged as an emaciated Jewish teenager from the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. Thirty years later, he relived his deportation, imprisonment and survival in a novel called "Fateless." Now, at 76, the amiable Hungarian finds himself revisiting the experience as the writer of the script for a movie, also "Fateless."
"How can you not be touched by seeing your own story?" asked Mr. Kertész, who won the 2002 Nobel prize for literature. "I think the film is very beautiful, but it is not the book. The film is a visual thing. The child awakens immediate sympathy. The text should play a secondary role to the action and images."
The notion of a "beautiful" Holocaust movie may seem as strange as the homesickness that Mr. Kertész recalled feeling for camp life when he returned to Budapest in July 1945. But "Fateless" is not a chronicle of the Holocaust as such. Rather, it is a coming-of-age story set amid humanity's ever-repeating cycles of barbarism.
The story has haunted much of Mr. Kertész's writing. And as author of the screenplay for Lajos Koltai's movie adaptation, which opens Friday at the Film Forum in New York, he is once again wrestling with these memories. He has condensed some scenes from the book, replaced most first-person narrative with visual metaphors and even added a couple of scenes.
"The film is more autobiographical than the book," he said in an interview at his Berlin home, where his wife, Magda, volunteered to interpret his Hungarian. "I'm not even sure if I wrote the screenplay from memories or from memories of the book."
Either way, the movie retains the dreamlike quality of the novel, recently published in a new English translation as "Fatelessness" (Vintage). And it is this quality that most distinguishes Mr. Kertész's very personal account of surviving the Holocaust. "The film had to try very hard to avoid Holocaust clichés," Mr. Kertész said. "It could be emotional, but never sentimental."
In the novel, the story is recounted by Gyuri Köves, who is 14 in June 1944 when he is taken off a crowded bus in Budapest and deported with hundreds of other Jews to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In the movie, the story is seen mainly through the eyes of Gyuri, played by Marcell Nagy. In both cases, the plot advances in an almost matter-of-fact way.
Arriving in Auschwitz, Gyuri is told by other deportees to give his age as 16, a lie that saves him from immediate death. Three days later, he is sent to Buchenwald and subsequently to a labor camp at Zeitz, also in Germany. The months that follow are accompanied by fear, hunger, abuse and freezing temperatures, but also by moments of solidarity among the prisoners.
This solidarity saves Gyuri's life....
"How can you not be touched by seeing your own story?" asked Mr. Kertész, who won the 2002 Nobel prize for literature. "I think the film is very beautiful, but it is not the book. The film is a visual thing. The child awakens immediate sympathy. The text should play a secondary role to the action and images."
The notion of a "beautiful" Holocaust movie may seem as strange as the homesickness that Mr. Kertész recalled feeling for camp life when he returned to Budapest in July 1945. But "Fateless" is not a chronicle of the Holocaust as such. Rather, it is a coming-of-age story set amid humanity's ever-repeating cycles of barbarism.
The story has haunted much of Mr. Kertész's writing. And as author of the screenplay for Lajos Koltai's movie adaptation, which opens Friday at the Film Forum in New York, he is once again wrestling with these memories. He has condensed some scenes from the book, replaced most first-person narrative with visual metaphors and even added a couple of scenes.
"The film is more autobiographical than the book," he said in an interview at his Berlin home, where his wife, Magda, volunteered to interpret his Hungarian. "I'm not even sure if I wrote the screenplay from memories or from memories of the book."
Either way, the movie retains the dreamlike quality of the novel, recently published in a new English translation as "Fatelessness" (Vintage). And it is this quality that most distinguishes Mr. Kertész's very personal account of surviving the Holocaust. "The film had to try very hard to avoid Holocaust clichés," Mr. Kertész said. "It could be emotional, but never sentimental."
In the novel, the story is recounted by Gyuri Köves, who is 14 in June 1944 when he is taken off a crowded bus in Budapest and deported with hundreds of other Jews to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In the movie, the story is seen mainly through the eyes of Gyuri, played by Marcell Nagy. In both cases, the plot advances in an almost matter-of-fact way.
Arriving in Auschwitz, Gyuri is told by other deportees to give his age as 16, a lie that saves him from immediate death. Three days later, he is sent to Buchenwald and subsequently to a labor camp at Zeitz, also in Germany. The months that follow are accompanied by fear, hunger, abuse and freezing temperatures, but also by moments of solidarity among the prisoners.
This solidarity saves Gyuri's life....