Dossier K: A Memoir Read online

  DOSSIER K

  Originally published as K. dosszié by Magvető Kiadó, Budapest, 2006

  © 2006 Imre Kertész

  Published by permission of Rowohlt Verlag GmbH,

  Reinbek bei Hamburg

  Translation © 2013 Tim Wilkinson

  First Melville House printing: April 2013

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-203-1

  A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  Notes

  Works Referenced

  About The Author

  The conversation that I conducted with my friend and editor Zoltán Hafner over the course of 2003 and 2004 by way of a so-called “in-depth” interview filled maybe a dozen magnetic tapes. A file containing a transcript of the edited material caught up with me at my hotel in the little Swiss town of Gstaad. Having looked through the first few sentences, I set the bundle of the manuscript to one side, and with what one might call an involuntary movement opened the lid to my computer … That is how this book came into being—the only one of my books that I have written more because of external prompting than out of any inner compulsion: a veritable autobiography. If one acknowledges Nietzsche’s proposition that the prototype of the novel as an art form was to be found in the Platonic dialogues, then the Reader is in fact holding a novel in his or her hands.

  I. K.

  In Fiasco you write: “When I was fourteen and a half, through a conjunction of infinitely inane circumstances, I found myself looking down the barrel of a loaded machine gun for half an hour.” I suppose that must have happened in the barracks of the gendarmerie. Why was that episode left out of Fatelessness?

  From the novel’s perspective, it was a purely anecdotal element; that’s why it had to be left out.

  Yet from the perspective of your own life it must nevertheless have been a fairly decisive element …

  Does that mean I’m going to have to say something about things that I never wished to talk about?

  Then why did you write about it?

  Perhaps precisely so I would not have to talk about it.

  Do you find it that difficult?

  You know, this is just like the interviews with elderly survivors in that Spielberg series. I hate all those kind of statements like “They herded us into the stables … They drove us out into a courtyard … They took us off to the brick works in Budakalász,” and the like.

  Isn’t that what happened?

  In the novel, yes, it did. But then a novel is fiction …

  Which in your case I know is based on reality. How was it that you came to be in that narrow courtyard at the gendarmerie barracks?

  All things considered, exactly as I described in Fatelessness. In the middle of the night—I was fast asleep, resting against the knees of the person behind me, and the person in front of me was resting against my drawn-up legs—I wakened to the sound of shouting and sirens wailing. A minute later and I was standing there, in the yard, under a moonlit sky across which successive squadrons of bomber aircraft were passing. On the low walls, drunken gendarmes were squatting behind machine guns trained on the mass of people who were crowded into the barracks courtyard—on us. But there’s no point in my telling you this; you can read a much better account of it in Fiasco.

  Yes, but there it seems that the boy hasn’t a clue about the whole thing, about how he came to be there.

  That, in essence, was how it was.

  Were you never interested in what I might call the historical background to that scene?

  Of course, it’s just that the circumstances weren’t so easy …

  The reality, you mean, not the fiction …

  I wouldn’t draw such a sharp distinction between the two, but let’s drop that for now. The trouble was that under the Kádár regime it was extraordinarily difficult to get hold of any documentation—particularly during the Sixties, when I was writing Fatelessness. It was as though they were in cahoots with the Nazi past, the way that all documentation was hidden away: one had to pull out the mostly deficient material from the very back shelves of libraries, and publishing at the time drew a total veil over the past. Nevertheless, I finally managed to piece together that what had lain behind my arrest was a gendarme putsch that had been planned to go ahead in late June 1944. The aim of the putsch, in essence, was to enable the deportation of the Jewish residents of Budapest to Germany to proceed. As we now know, once Horthy saw what the outcome of the Second World War was going to be, and bearing in mind the declaration the Allied powers had made that when the war was over, anybody who had had a hand in the extermination of Jews in Europe was going to be called to account, he ordered a halt to the deportations from Budapest, which was the area over which he had tight control. The gendarmerie wanted to revoke that. As a first step, they threw a ring round Budapest one day at dawn and set up control points at the city’s administrative boundaries. As you know, the gendarmerie’s sphere of action did not extend to the capital: while they were the arm of the law in the provinces, in Budapest it was “the boys in blue.” Anyway, the gendarmerie somehow managed to pull in the regular police, and on that day the police arrested all the people wearing yellow stars who stepped over the city limits, whether or not a person had a specific permit to do so. That was how I was arrested along with my companions, eighteen of us, all boys of fourteen or fifteen, who were working at the Shell Oil refinery just outside the city limits.

  As far as I know, the gendarme putsch eventually failed.

  That’s right. Lieutenant General László Faragho, who, alongside His Serene Highness the Regent, was joint head of the gendarmerie, got notice of the brewing putsch in time, and for his part, he concentrated the regular army troops under his command and duly won the gendarmes round to giving up their plan.

  But by then they had caught you. Did that also happen the way you described it in Fatelessness?

  Exactly so.

  So, it was the reality that you wrote down after all. Why are you so insistent on the term “fiction”?

  Look here, that’s a pretty basic issue. A couple of decades later, when I decided that I was going to write a novel, I was obliged to sort out, for my personal use so to say, what the difference was between the genres of the novel and the autobiography, “memoirs,” if only to stop me from adding yet another book to what already back in Sixties had swollen into a library of, how should I put it …

  Holocaust literature. Isn’t that what you wanted to say?

  Yes, that’s what it’s called nowadays. Back then, in the Sixties, the word “Holocaust” wasn’t familiar; it only came into use later on—and incorrectly at that. I’ve just recalled what it was called back then: Lager literature.

  That’s a better classification?

  Let’s not get into considering the point now.

  Agreed, but we shall come back to it later on. What would be of more interest to me right now is the difference between fiction and autobiography, as critics and readers alike commonly refer to Fatelessness as an autobiographical novel.

  Incorrectly, I have to say, because no such genre exists. A book is either autobiography or a novel. If it’s autobiography you evoke the past, you try as scrupulously as possible to stick to your recollections; it’s a matter of extraordinary importance that you write everything down exactly the way it happened, as it’s usually put: that you don’t varnish the facts one little bit. A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can �
�depend.” In a novel, by contrast, it’s not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.

  But as far as I’m aware—and it’s something that you have repeatedly confirmed in statements you have made—your novel is absolutely authentic; every facet of the story is based on documented facts.

  That’s not inconsistent with its being fictional. Quite the opposite. In Fiasco I describe just how far I went in the interests of summoning up the past, in order to reawaken in myself the atmosphere of the camps.

  You used to sniff the strap of your wristwatch …

  Yes, because somehow or other the whiff of freshly tanned leather reminded me of the smell that used to build up between the barrack blocks in Auschwitz. Slivers of reality like that are, of course, very important for fiction as well. But there is still a crucial difference, in that while autobiography is a recollection of something, fiction creates a world of some kind.

  To my way of thinking, remembrance is also the recreation of a portion of the world.

  But without going beyond that portion of the world; yet that’s what happens in fiction. The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author’s head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.

  But you can’t mean to say that you invented Auschwitz?

  But in a certain sense that is exactly so. In the novel I did have to invent Auschwitz and bring it to life; I could not fall back on externalities, on so-called historical facts outside the novel; everything had to come into being hermetically, through the magic of the language and composition. Look at the book from that point of view. From the very first lines you can already get a feeling that you have entered a strange sovereign realm in which everything or, to be more accurate, anything can happen. As the story progresses, the sense of being abandoned increasingly takes hold of the reader; there is a growing sense of losing one’s footing …

  Yes. Non habent sua fata libelli—books do not have their own fate—as György Spiró put it in his memorable 1983 essay, which as it happened was the first major assessment of Fatelessness that had been printed in Hungary since its publication in 1975. But that is getting far beside the point; we have digressed a long way from that barracks courtyard. We were at the point where the gendarmes …

  Declared that they had seen us signaling by candlelight from the stables to the RAF aircraft.

  You’re kidding!

  Not at all; that really is what they said. At first I too took it to be some sort of joke, but then I could see they weren’t joking at all. If so much as one bomb were to be dropped near us, they would “hack us to pieces”—that was the threat, and it was clear that they could hardly wait for that bomb to be dropped. They were in a murderous mood, most of them dead drunk, like hyenas that have caught the scent of blood. It was a brilliant scene, in fact, and yet it didn’t fit into Fatelessness. It almost broke my heart to leave it out, but then there you are: that’s fiction for you. Remorseless in its laws. But then I managed to salvage the scene in Fiasco.

  How can you be so … so …

  Cynical?

  I didn’t want to say it.

  You won’t offend me. I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that’s just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.

  In that case, let me ask: What did you feel that night, when you had not yet acquired enough of that … I would not say cynicism so much as irony to maintain your detachment? The irony with which, after all, you came face to face with death? Weren’t you afraid?

  I probably was, but I no longer recall. What was much more important, though, was a kind of recognition that I managed to formulate many years later in Fiasco: “I grasped the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time.”

  A devastating realization.

  Yes, and yet also not. You know, it is not so easy to dampen the joie de vivre of a fourteen-year-old boy, especially if he is surrounded by pals of the same age who are sharing his fate. There is a … an unspoiled innocence about him that protects him from a sense of being completely defenceless, completely without hope. In that sense, an adult can be broken much more quickly.

  Is that perception based on your own experiences, or is it something you heard or read about later on?

  It was something that I both observed for myself and also read about. Look, let’s be frank here. Among the masses of books on the same sort of subject, only a very few are truly able to genuinely put into words the unparalleled experience of being in the Nazi death camps. And it is perhaps the essays of Jean Améry that say the most, even among those exceptional authors. He has a superbly precise word: Weltvertrauen, which I would translate as “trust in the world.” Well, he writes about how hard it is to live without that trust, and once a person has lost it he is condemned to perpetual solitude among people. A person like that will never again be able to see fellow men but only ever anti-men (Mitmenschen and Gegenmenschen are the original expressions). That trust was beaten out of Améry by the Gestapo when he was tortured in Fort Breendonk, a Belgian fort that was set up as a prison. In vain did he survive Auschwitz; decades later he carried out the sentence on himself by committing suicide.

  It’s typical that those superb—terrifyingly superb—essays appeared in Hungarian translation only recently in the low-circulation publication Múlt és Jövő [Past and Future], and even that was only a modest selection from Améry’s works. But to go back to “trust in the world.”

  Indeed, and I think that even at the extreme of my own most emaciated state of physical deterioration that trust … even if I was not exactly radiating it, it must have been plain to see. I simply supposed that the adult world had a duty to save me from that and get me home in one piece. That sounds rather funny today, but it really was the way I felt. I firmly believe that I have that childish trust to thank for my being rescued.

  Whereas innumerable other children …

  … died. Yes, it’s not easy being an exception.

  Did any others survive out of the seventeen who were taken off the bus with you and later sent off to Auschwitz?

  No, they all died.

  Did you get any confirmation of that?

  After the war was over, my mother placed an advertisement, but no one came forward. In just the same way as she put in an advertisement in the summer of 1944, when I vanished: the parents of children who vanished at the Csepel Island customs post should make themselves known.

  Was it still possible for such an advertisement to appear after the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944?

  So it seems, because it did appear. But my mother took on an even odder thing than that. She upped and just as she was, yellow star on her chest, went off to the War Office—I think that’s what the Ministry of Defence was called by then.

  She must have been a very plucky lady.

  She was plucky, to be sure, but most of all, she had no real grasp of what was going on all around her. Her “trust in the world” remained unscathed right to the end. She was a good-looking woman, my mother; she had an elegant dress sense and would let nothing stop her. She might wear a yellow star and board “the rear platform of a tram” as the regulations required, but men would still leap to their feet and offer her a seat inside the carriage. She was proud of the fact that she bore a resemblance to Anna Töke, who was a famous actress of the time, so it sometimes happened that passers-by in the street would ask for her autograph. She was simply unwilling to face up to facts, to size up the magnitude of the risks. I just can’t imagine how she managed to get through to the office of some quite high-ranking officer—a captain or major. “But madam,” the major protested, “please! May I ask you at least to be so kind as to take the yellow star off your dress …” Needless to say, my mother demanded that her son be returned, or at the very least that she be
told where he was and what had happened to him. What’s more, the major made inquiries about it straight away, and Mother was informed that her son and his companions had been taken off to Transylvania and put to work as loggers at a timber-forest there; and even if her mind was not entirely put at rest by that, right there and then Mother was willing to believe it for the time being, because that was what she wanted to believe. At the time people would hold on for dear life to such illusions as they had contrived about the world order being rational.

  Astounding! But that reminds me of something for which I have been seeking an answer ever since my first encounter with your books. Were the Jews of Hungary really quite so ill-informed? Quite so much in the dark about what was in store for them?

  I can only speak for my own experiences in Budapest, insofar as I picked up anything from my immediate circle of family and acquaintances: nobody here suspected anything, and I never heard of any place called Auschwitz. All Jewish families would listen in secret to the BBC radio broadcasts—at least until Jews were obliged to “hand over” their wireless sets, that is—and if they heard anything that ruffled their optimism, they would just dismiss it as “English propaganda.”

  What lay behind that?

  There were many causes, both historical and psychological. There is no question that after the obliteration of the Hungarian Eighth Army on the Don bend—in the course of which countless Jews who had been sent there on labor service, to be used in mine-clearance work on the battlefield, also died—the enthusiasm for war let up. That momentary relief, in 1943, deluded the Jewish population, who believed that they were in a privileged position. Rumours about the shuttlecock diplomacy being conducted by Prime Minister Miklós Kállay went the rounds, with people saying that “a deal” was going to be struck with the Allies behind the backs of the Germans. Then on March 19th, 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary, and at Birkenau they made a start on enlarging the crematoria and laying a new railway track in preparation for the arrival of transports from Hungary. A high-ranking SS officer by the name of Eichmann arrived in Budapest to be greeted with a considerable sum of money from the Jewish Council. At the same time they were given a copy of the so-called “Vrba-Wetzlar Report” or the “Auschwitz Protocols.” Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzlar, a pair of Slovak Jewish prisoners, after lengthy and very thorough preparatory work, managed to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp and to assemble a memorandum in which they gave a precise description of what was happening in that death factory. Considerable space was also devoted to the preparations that were under way to handle the consignments of Jews from Hungary, already then, with the preparations as yet still in progress, anticipating the disastrous fate that would meet those consignments. The Jewish Council in Hungary discussed the report and decided not to make its contents known to the Jewish populace of several hundred thousand, whom the gendarmes had in fact already started to herd together into hastily improvised ghettos.