Fate is unpredictable

Author: Imre Kertész
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-02-01
Features: The film script "Fateless" is adapted from Imre Kertész's first novel, a long, autobiographical work titled "Fateless," written over two decades earlier. The work draws from the author's real and terrifying experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during his youth. It was this experience that brought him a lifelong nightmare; it was this experience that forced him to lose his individual fate, leading him to begin an endless self-exile. Therefore, from a deeper sense of the work, perhaps translating the title as "Lost Fate" would be more accurate. "Fateless" is set against the backdrop of the second world war, telling the story of a Hungarian Jewish boy named Gy?rgy Kertész who was "dramatically" taken during his commute and transported from Budapest to Nazi concentration camps located in Poland and Germany. In the inhumane concentration camp, the innocent Kertész survives in humiliation with the purity of a child's heart in the cruel reality. He naturally views the world through the lens of human nature, seeing the arrest as a game of hide-and-seek; he explains his tears at parting with his father as "finally doing something for his father"; he admires the bloody city bombing as "Christmas tree lights"; he understands the hanging of a "fugitive" by Nazi soldiers as a punishment for violating the rules of the game. In the daily "grey weekdays," he longs for that "lovely hour of rest." When he observes the dense lice "gathering" in his leg wound, it seems that the suffering body is no longer his own—even in the concentration camp, even beside the rows of chimneys, there was something akin to joy during moments of temporary relief from pain." Even, he found something he treasured as "love" outside the gas chamber and beside the crematorium. The 2002 "Nobel Prize in Literature" not only brought fame to Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor and Hungarian Jewish writer, but also suddenly exposed a wound that humanity is reluctant to confront. This elderly man, now in his twilight years, has been locked in a small space like a cocoon made of blood scabs, silently writing for half a century with memories of terror and despair. The film script "Fateless" is adapted from Imre Kertész's first novel, a long, autobiographical work titled "Fateless," written over two decades earlier. The work draws from the author's real and terrifying experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during his youth. It is set against the backdrop of the late World War II, telling the story of a Hungarian Jewish boy named Gy?rgy Kertész who was "dramatically" taken during his commute and transported from Budapest to Nazi concentration camps located in Poland and Germany. In the inhumane concentration camp, the innocent Kertész survives in humiliation with the purity of a child's heart in the cruel reality.