Imre Kertész - Fatelessness

Only in Zeitz did I come to realize that even captivity has its mundane round; indeed, true captivity is actually nothing but a gray mundane round. It was as if I had been in a roughly comparable situation already, that time in the train on the way to Auschwitz; there too everything had hinged on time, and then on each person’s individual capabilities. Except in Zeitz, to stay with my simile, the feeling I had was that the train had come to a standstill. From another angle, though — and this is also true — it rushed along at such speed that I was unable to keep up with all the changes in front of and around me, or even within myself. One thing I can say at least: for my own part, I traveled the entire route, scrupulously exploring every chance that might present itself on the way.

At all events, in any place, even a concentration camp, one gets stuck into a new thing with good intentions, at least that was my experience; for the time being, it was sufficient to become a good prisoner, the rest was in the hands of the future — that, by and large, was how I grasped it, what I based my conduct on, and incidentally was pretty much the same as I saw others were doing in general. I soon noticed, it goes without saying, that those favorable opinions I had heard when still at Auschwitz about the institution of the Arbeitslager must certainly have been founded on somewhat exaggerated reports. As to the entire extent of that exaggeration, and above all the inferences that stemmed from it, however, I did not — nor, in the end, could I — immediately take fully accurate account of this myself, and that was again pretty much what I perceived to be the case with others, indeed I dare say with everyone else, all of the approximately two thousand other prisoners in our camp — the suicides excepted, naturally. But then those cases were uncommon, in no way the rule nor in any way exemplary, everyone recognized. I too got wind of the occasional occurrence of that kind, hearing people arguing and exchanging views about it, some with undisguised disapproval, others more sympathetically, acquaintances with sorrow, but on the whole always in the way of someone striving to form a judgment of a deed that was exceedingly rare, remote to our experience, in some ways hard to explain, maybe slightly frivolous, maybe even slightly honorable, but in any case premature.

The main thing was not to neglect oneself; somehow there would always be a way, for it had never yet happened that there wasn’t a way somehow, as Bandi Citrom instilled in me, and he in turn had been instructed in this wisdom by the labor camp. The first and most important thing under all circumstances was to wash oneself (before the parallel rows of troughs with the perforated iron piping, in the open air, on the side of the camp over toward the highway). Equally essential was a frugal apportioning of the rations, whether or not there were any. Whatever rigor this disciplining might cost you, a portion of the bread ration had to be left for the next morning’s coffee, some of it indeed — by maintaining an undeflectable guard against the inclination of your every thought, and above all your itching fingers, to stray toward your pocket — for the lunch break: that way, and only that way, could you avoid, for instance, the tormenting thought that you had nothing to eat. That the item in your wardrobe I had hitherto regarded as a handkerchief was a foot cloth; that the only secure place to be at roll call and in a marching column was always the middle of a row; that even when soup was being dished out one would do better to aim, not for the front, but for the back of the queue, where you could predict they would be serving from the bottom of the vat, and therefore from the thicker sediment; that one side of the handle of your spoon could be hammered out into a tool that might also serve as a knife — all these things, and much else besides, all of it knowledge essential to prison life, I was taught by Bandi Citrom, learning by watching and myself striving to emulate.

I would never have believed it, yet it is a positive fact that nowhere is a certain discipline, a certain exemplariness, I might even say virtue, in one’s conduct of life as obviously important as it is in captivity. It suffices merely to take a little look around the area of Block 1, where the camp’s native inmates live. The yellow triangles on their chests tell you all you really need to know, while the letter “L” in them discloses the incidental circumstance that they have come from distant Latvia, more specifically from the city of Riga, I was informed. Among them one can see those peculiar beings who at first were a little disconcerting. Viewed from a certain distance, they are senilely doddering old codgers, and with their heads retracted into their necks, their noses sticking out from their faces, the filthy prison duds that they wear hanging loosely from their shoulders, even on the hottest summer’s day they put one in mind of winter crows with a perpetual chill. As if with each and every single stiff, halting step they take one were to ask: is such an effort really worth the trouble? These mobile question marks, for I could characterize not only their outward appearance but perhaps even almost their very exiguousness in no other way, are known in the concentration camps as “ Musulmänner ” or “Muslims,” I was told. Bandi Citrom promptly warned me away from them: “You lose any will to live just looking at them,” he reckoned, and there was some truth in that, though as time passed I also came to realize it takes much more than just that.

For example, your first device is stubbornness: it may have come in varying forms, but I can tell you there was no lack of it at Zeitz, and at times it can be of immense assistance, so I observed. For instance, I found out more from Bandi Citrom about that weird band, collection, breed, or whatever one should call them, a specimen of which — on my left in the row — had already somewhat astonished me on my arrival. It was he who told me that we call them “Finns.” Certainly if you ask them where they are from, they really do reply — if they see fit to give you any answer at all, that is — something like “ fin Minkács ,” for example, by which they mean they are from Munkachevo, or “ fin Sadarada ,” which, for example (and you have to guess), is Sátoraljaújhely. Bandi Citrom already knows their organization from labor camp and doesn’t speak very highly of it. They can be seen everywhere, at work, while marching or at Appell , rocking rhythmically back and forth as they unflaggingly mutter their prayers to themselves, like some unrepayable debt. When meanwhile they speak out of the corner of the mouth to whisper across something like, “Knife for sale,” you don’t pay any attention. All the less so, however tempting it may be, especially in the morning, when it is “Soup for sale,” because, however strange it may sound, they don’t touch soup nor even the sausage that we occasionally get — nothing prescribed by their religion. “So what do they live on?” you might well ask, and Bandi Citrom would reply: you don’t have to worry about them, they look after themselves. He would be right too because, as you see, they stay alive. Among one another and with the Latvians they use Yiddish, but they also speak German, Slovakian, and a smattering of who knows what, only not Hungarian — unless it’s a question of doing business, of course. On one occasion (there was no getting out of it), as luck would have it, I ended up in their work Kommando . Their first question was “ Rayds di yiddish? ” When I told them that, no, unfortunately I didn’t, that was it as far as they were concerned, I became a nonperson, they looked at me as if I were thin air, or rather didn’t exist at all. I tried to speak, get myself noticed, but to no avail. “ Di bisht nisht kai yid, d’bisht a shaygets,” [12] “You’re not a Jew, you’re a Gentile kid.” they shook their heads, and I could only wonder at how people who after all were reputedly at home in the business world could cling so irrationally to something from which the harm to them was so much more, the losses so much greater, than any gains with regard to the end result. That day I learned that the discomfiture, the skin-crawling awkwardness which at times took hold between us was already familiar to me from back home, as if there had been something not quite right about me, as if I did not quite measure up to the proper ideal, in short as if I were somehow Jewish — a rather odd feeling to have after all, I reckoned, in the midst of Jews, in a concentration camp.