Profoundly moving Holocaust drama, based on the novel by Imre Kertész, 2002 Nobel Prize laureate and concentration camp survivor, FATELESS offers a new perspective on this dark period. A 14-year-old Hungarian boy’s response to his experience during the Holocaust is curiously ambivalent.
Imre Kertesz’s moving and disturbing novel is about a Hungarian Jewish boy’s experiences in German concentration camps and his attempts to reconcile himself to those experiences after the war. Upon his return to his native Budapest, still clad in his striped prison clothes, fourteen year old Gyuri Koves senses the indifference, even hostility, of people on the street. His former neighbours and friends urge him to “put the ordeal out of his mind”, while a sympathetic intellectual keeps referring to the camps as “the lowest circle of hell”. The boy can relate to neither cliché and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone.