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272 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1975
This is when I found out that you could be bored even in Auschwitz - provided you were choosy. We waited and we waited, and as I come to think of it, we waited for nothing to happen. This boredom, combined with this strange waiting, was, I think, approximately what Auschwitz meant to me, but of course I am only speaking for myself.As he said, he's only speaking for himself. Here, I am speaking for myself, as is the case for any and all fiction, and even some of the non. What I speak involves my understanding, not my knowledge, my general aversion to gnosticism grown to unpronounceable proportions. Such as it should be with regards to the Shoah, yes? First the horror, then the silence.
With a cracking voice, she desperately shouted something to the effect that if our distinctiveness was unimportant, than all this was mere chance, and that if there was the possibility of her being someone other than whom she was fated to be, then all of this was utterly without reason, and to her that idea was totally "unbearable."If you are punished, and have committed a crime, you are guilty. If you are punished, and have committed [...], ranging from birth to creed to whatever the reason one condemns another wholesale and complete, each on either side simply one of a many millions, you are innocent. A horror, the horror, your horror, or so they say. They, the bystanders, millions compounded and compounded again muttering in the stands, still capable of wanting, needing, crafting a story. They need their catharsis, especially the diffuse of responsibilities and unwitting (maybe? perhaps? they claim victimhood as well and don't want to think about it) accomplices. You will provide.
All of this, as I said, I noticed, but not in the same way as later, when I started to fit the pieces together and could sum up and recall the events step by step. I had become used to every new step gradually, and this hadn't given me the detachment I needed to actually notice what was happening.Was there a story in there somewhere, one a little more entertaining than the fact you managed to live to this day, and all the turns and twists and often boring banalities involved in such a happenstance? That would imply a reason behind it all, when everyone knows the capriciousness of life. Far deeper down than I would have thought, this knowledge, considering how they keep insisting on the climax, the tragedy, the entertainment. And this is only one genocide out of many, only one part of one genocide if one thinks only of the six million. What of the rest of the voices? Do they not fit within the parameters of what deserves to be heard? If those who still live on refuse the title of "victim", contemplate the multifarious of their experiences within the full range of feeling and thought, grasp their memories of such a time of their life as anyone else would, are they worth the time?
Then, that day I also experienced that very same tenseness, that same itchy feeling and clumsiness that came over me when I was with them, that I had occasionally felt at home: as if I weren't entirely okay, as if I didn't entirely conform to the ideal; in other words, somehow as if I were Jewish. That was a rather strange feeling, because, after all, I was among Jews and in a concentration camp.He speaks of his lack of faith while the blood bound heritage of it couples him to a baffled mind and moldering body.
Only slowly, and not without some humorous puzzlement and wonder, did the idea dawn on me: this situation, this state of imprisonment, had to be what was causing his agony. I was almost tempted to say to him: "Don't be sad. After all, it's not important." But I was afraid to be so bold, and then I also remembered that I didn't know any French.He puzzles at the monotone view of his day to day life by others, one restricted to pity, pity, pity. As if his effort to see the worth in living had time for that, when there were so many other things to think upon.
But who can judge what is possible or believable in a concentration camp? Who could explore, exhaust all those countless ideas, inventions, games, jokes, and ponderable theories, which are easily accessible and transferable from a make-believe world of fantasy into a concentration-camp reality? You couldn't, even if you mustered the totality of your knowledge.The horror, the horror, the horror. What else?
All the same, I thought, at least we were able to send him off to the labor camp, poor man, with memories of a nice day.
I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.
"Have you come from Germany, son?" "Yes." "From the concentration camps?" "Naturally." "Which one?" "Buchenwald." Yes, he had heard of it; he knew it was "one of the pits of the Nazi hell," as he put it. "Where did they carry you off from?" "From Budapest." "How long were you there?" "A year in total." "You must have seen a lot, young fellow, a lot of terrible things," he rejoined, but I said nothing. "Still," he continued, "the main thing is that it's over, in the past," and, his face brightening, he gestured to the houses that we happened to be rumbling past and inquired what I was feeling now, back home again and seeing the city that I had left. "Hatred," I told him.Now I know more, and it strikes me that Kert茅sz is in dialogue with all the writers I've mentioned. He's picking up Levi's statement about Auschwitz--"Here there is no why,"--but Kert茅sz doesn't leave it there. Gyorgy insists on trying to see things from the point of view of his persecutors. He is too weak to work, which "understandably" irritates the guards. He must smell disgusting, having diarrhea. The lice must eat too, how can he blame them for feasting on him? Naturally he had been starved and beaten.
Buchenwald lies on the crest of one of the elevations in a region of hills and dales. Its air is clear, the countryside varied, with woods all around and the red-tiled roofs of the village houses in the valleys down below delightful to the eye. The bathhouse is situated off to the left. The prisoners are mostly friendly, though somehow in a different way than in Auschwitz.Heavily ironic, to be sure, but the reader understands that the fifteen-year-old narrator wants desperately to believe that he has come to a better place and, strange as it sounds, he has a favorite moment, dusk, when he is at peace with his surroundings.
"even in Auschwitz, it seems, it is possible to be bored鈥攁ssuming one is privileged."
"Somehow, from his angry look and his deft sleight of hand, I suddenly understood why his train of thought would make it impossible to abide Jews, for otherwise he might have had the unpleasant feeling that he was cheating them."
" 鈥�...I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.鈥�
"You too," he said, "are now a part of the shared Jewish fate,"
" we can never start a new life, only ever carry on the old one."
" I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the "atrocities," whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps."