Free Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész

same way that the cause of his death would have been an incomprehensible absurdity. An explanation can be found for both cases, but those explanations call for further explanations and so on
ad infinitum
, back to the start of history or theCreation, if you will. As for
me
, the person who lived through it all yet used the experiences as the raw material for a novel
—I
am able to vanish nicely and comfortably between fiction and the facts that are called reality.
    And tread on toward the next novel
.
    Yes, with the feeling that I may have written a novel but I have solved nothing. The riddle of the world has remained just as tormenting a thorn as it was before.
    I know you are reluctant to speak about your camp experiences, but you mentioned just before that the alteration of your record card in Buchenwald would have called for the covert collaboration of several individuals. Who might those individuals have been?
    I don’t think there’s much point in spending much time on the structure of Buchenwald camp. Look, every concentration camp was different from all the others—such was the
“univers concentrationaire.”
From a certain point of view (but certainly not mine), Buchenwald in 1944–45 was one of the “less rigorous” camps. That was a result of the ruthless battle that the “red triangle” political prisoners had fought for many years against the “green triangle” criminals. It was a matter of who controlled the internal administration of the camp. The internal administration in its entirety was run by the prisoners, so the ones who had charge of the administration held the power. Since the “red triangle” prisoners were generally more intelligent, more astute, and better organizedthan the “greens,” they gradually gained control of the office that handled job allocation and the transports, and in that way they slowly managed to free themselves of the criminal elements by channelling them to auxiliary camps, allocating them to Commandos doing the most unpleasant work—but maybe it’s better I don’t go into the details. As a result, though, the political prisoners were able to do, and indeed did, quite a lot above all for the children, for whom otherwise certain death would have waited in the typhus-ridden barracks of the so-called Little Camp that was opened for the anonymous masses of Hungarian Jews in 1944. The long arm of the politicals probably reached as far as the ramp, where they tried to fish out and salvage to relative safety a few lucky devils among the human debris of the transports.
    So there is a rational explanation, after all, for the process that seemed so irrational to you at the time
.
    Even today it seems every bit as irrational, because if I try to accept the rationality of the whole process that in the early winter of 1944–45 landed me, half-dead, in an icy puddle on the concrete of a Buchenwald unloading bay, there is still no way that I can consider it rational that I, of all people, and not someone else should have been rescued from there. If I were to accept that as being rational, I would also have to accept the notion of providence. But then if providence is rationality, why did it not extend to the six million others who died there?
    Nobody can accuse you of ducking awkward questions, asindeed is already very clear from your published work. But tell me, how can you live facing those questions?
    Like a gambler. I like playing for big stakes, and I am quite ready to lose it all at any second. As we must all die, we have the right—even a duty—to think boldly.
    There are quite a lot of people who would say that your way of thinking is pessimistic
.
    I don’t know what that means: I wouldn’t call dodging the ultimate questions optimism but plain cowardice. I can understand it, but an optimist has to die just as much as a pessimist. Whether we yield to death blindly or confront it head-on doesn’t matter in practice. I would prefer to confront it head-on because