Can you write anything new about the holocaust? Yes, if you have a fresh perspective like Kertész. Though absurd, a sixteen-year-old survivor (he was only fifteen at the start of the story) of the concentration camp, Gyuri reminisced the bad old days of his prison life. There was a moment every day that he enjoyed best—in the early evening when he finished a day’s hard labour before a frugal meal of soup and bread. It was probably that small comfort in life that the young man missed most. A longing for food was made stronger with its smell. Knowing that he would never experience such a strong desire after his release, he suddenly felt an emptiness, a void in life as if something important was taken away from him.
His heart was filled with hatred as he told the journalist he met on his return to Budapest. It was only natural for someone who had experienced torture, starvation and hardships for no other reason than being a Jew. If there is one thing Gyuri had learned from his experience, it was that all the Jews had a shared fate. It was a fate that they did not choose and yet had to live through. The young man also had a theory of how he managed pains and sufferings in the camp. The answer is Time. As long as pain came in bit by bit, second by second, minute by minute, day by day, and year by year, people could live through their sufferings. This is why some people had lived in the camp for as long as twelve years. Isn’t it how some of us will ourselves to remain optimistic even in hopeless situations?
As a Hungarian who did not speak German, Gyuri did not feel connected to most of the inmates. His language deficiency turned out to bring him a brief moment of reprieve. Though not mentioned in the novel, I suppose this is one of the reasons why he was transferred from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. How he and other people survived the concentration camps was a matter of sheer luck. When everyone asked him about the sufferings and atrocities, he wanted to talk about happiness of camp life. For him, there was always happiness beyond the chimneys and in between the intervals of torments. For a concentration camp prisoner, a moment when nothing happened was most memorable. That’s very true about life too. To survive a tragedy, we seek comic relief. In order not to tempt fate in our happy days, we reflect on human sufferings.