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 better 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?