Nobel Prize in Literature - 2002-10-12

Imre Kertész, for half a century of writing and works primarily concerned with the horrors of World War II, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. Mr. Kertész told Voice of America that he hopes this award will help Hungary understand and confront its role in World War II. The seventy-two-year-old Hungarian writer stated that he never expected the Nobel Prize and jokingly told his wife that in December, he would have to go to Oslo to receive it. The Swedish Academy awarded Mr. Kertész the prize to honor 'his writings that address the human experience, which, with all its vulnerability and fragility, must witness the barbaric tyranny of history.' Most of Mr. Kertész's writings are inspired by his own harrowing experiences as a Jew during World War II, facing Nazi oppression. Speaking to Voice of America in German, Mr. Kertész expressed hope that this award would make Hungary acknowledge the consequences of its participation in World War II, which was largely in close collaboration with Nazi Germany. He stated that Hungary has not yet properly confronted the reality of the massacre and extermination of Jews during the war. Hungary must eventually recognize the consequences of its complicity with Nazi Germany, which led to the murder of six hundred thousand Hungarian Jews in gas chambers. Born in 1929 in Hungary, Mr. Kertész was sent as a teenager in 1944 to the Auschwitz death camp in German-occupied Poland. He was then transferred to the forced labor camp of Buchenwald, which was liberated by the Allies a year later. However, when Mr. Kertész returned to Hungary, he only had a short period of freedom to engage in journalism and writing. In 1951, when his newspaper became one of the Communist Party's publications, he was expelled. Nevertheless, he managed to publish books that were translated into German. His first novel, 'Fatelessness,' was published in 1975 and was based on his experiences in Auschwitz, telling the story of a man sent to a forced labor camp who survives through compromise. Recently, a screenplay based on this story has been published. Mr. Kertész gained fame in 1990 with the novel 'Kaddish for an Unborn Child'; Kaddish is a prayer that Jews recite for the dead, and in the novel, it is a prayer he recites for a child he is unwilling to bring into a world that allowed the establishment of death camps. Although several Hungarians have won the Nobel Prize before, Mr. Kertész is the first citizen of Hungary to receive the one million dollar literature prize. Peter Magyari, the Prime Minister of Hungary, congratulated the writer on behalf of the government and added, 'This is another reason to be proud of being Hungarian.'