Fatelessness

In 1944 the fourteen-year-old Budapest Jew György Köves is pulled off a bus, deported, and survives Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the Zeitz labour camp with a bewildered, matter-of-fact detachment, before returning to a city that wants him to forget. Kertész, who lived it, maps the real geography of the catastrophe: the yellow-star house and the assembly points of Budapest, and the camps to the north where a boy learns to take each step of the machinery as, somehow, natural.

The father

The yellow-star house

Budapest, 1944

The novel opens as fourteen-year-old György is given a day off school because his father must report to a labour-service camp, and the family, marked by the yellow star, gathers to see him go. Kertész sets the ordinary domestic scene of a Budapest already sealed off and marked for destruction, told in the boy's oddly untroubled, obedient voice.

The opening chapters

explicit György's family lives in one of the real yellow-star houses to which Budapest's Jews were confined in 1944; sited in the city.

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