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Itongadol.- Hungarian novelist and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertész, winner of the 2002 Nobel literature prize, has died aged 86 after a long illness.
Kertész became a Nobel laureate for works the judges said portrayed the Nazi death camps as “the ultimate truth” about how low human beings could fall.
As a Jew persecuted by the Nazis, and then a writer living under repressive Hungarian communist rule, Kertész endured some of the most acute suffering of the 20th century and wrote about it in both direct and delicate prose.
He won the literature prize for “writing that upholds the experience of the individual in the face of a barbaric and arbitrary history,” the Swedish Nobel Academy said.
In his work, Kertész returned repeatedly to the experience of Auschwitz, the camp in German-occupied Poland where more than 1 million Jews and other victims of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich died.
“He is one of the few people who manages to describe that in a way which is immediately accessible to us, those who have not shared that experience,” Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the academy, said in 2002.
Kertész’s defining debut novel, Fateless, a first-person tale of a boy’s survival in a concentration camp, was written between 1960 and 1973, and initially rejected for publication by Hungary’s communist regime.
It was released in 1975 but was at first largely ignored the public. Kertész wrote about that in Fiasco (1988), regarded as the second volume of a trilogy closed by Kaddish For a Child Not Born (1990).
Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead and, in the novel, it is recited by the protagonist for the child he refuses to beget in a world that allowed Auschwitz to exist.
Born in Budapest in 1929, Kertész was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and on to the Buchenwald concentration camp in eastern Germany until 1945. He returned to Hungary and worked as a journalist, but lost his job in 1951 when his paper adopted the communist party line.
Kertész was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel literature prize, though Hungarians had previously won Nobel science awards.
He produced his last works in Berlin before returning to Budapest. Kertész had Parkinson’s disease, and rarely left his Budapest home.