Free Dossier K: A Memoir by Imre Kertész Page A

to me that signifies a fuller life; ultimately it gives me more pleasure. You could say I am a hedonist.
    Not a moralist?
    No way! The age of the great moralists—of Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, and so on—has long passed. Since Auschwitz it has become redundant to make any judgments about human nature. The way of the moralist nowadays leads straight to mass movements, and that is more than a little problematic, besides which it is boring. But leave them be: let them believe that there is such a thing as a just dictatorship without death camps, where everyone is obliged to be happy. To my way of thinking happiness means something else—that’s all there is to it.
    What about justice?
    Truth is no longer universal—that’s a grave fact, but it must be acknowledged. Standing up for oneself: that’s the hardest, it always was. That’s precisely what the moralist runs from. Our era does not favour the preservation of the individual; it is simpler to surrender ourselves to salvational ideas than stick to our own unique and irreproducible existence, to choose our own truth rather than
the
truth. But let’s not get into this.
    Let’s carry on with the chronicle. What is your memory of your liberation?
    I described it in
Fatelessness
. Those were heady days for us. Every day the order would be given out that Jews were to assemble on the Appellplatz. Death marches set off from the camp to other camps that lay further afield. Every night there was an air raid, and along with the bombs we were able to pick out approaching artillery fire. Over the last few days SS boots thudded on Lager thoroughfares, rifle shots were audible. Finally, around noon one day, the order was bellowed from the loudspeakers that all SS personnel were to leave the camp, “without delay.” A few hours later the roar of General Patton’s victorious tanks could be heard in the distance. By that night a Hershey bar and a Lucky Strike cigarette had flown onto every bed; in the kitchens the cooks were preparing a thick goulash. We greedily tucked the soup down, but ingesting the heavy food was deadly for more than a few. That was April 11th. The date was murmuredat every hand. The loudspeakers, which up till then had relayed the orders of the SS, were switched to the BBC radio broadcasts, which gave news about the liberation of a Buchenwald concentration camp that lay close to the city of Weimar. It was strange to be in Buchenwald listening to the emotional and astonished reports that were made about Buchenwald. It was strange to return of the world of humankind. The rest is just anecdotal.
    In
Fatelessness
György Köves rings the doorbell to the Fleischmanns’ home and demands to have his fate given back to him
.
    That’s right. There’s no denying that I too rang some doorbell, but I wouldn’t swear that my one-time neighbours really were called Fleischmann and Steiner. At the home in Baross Street someone else opened the door: that was the overture to the reality that I had returned to a changed world, but the experience of seeing a stranger at the door instead of my father or stepmother was like a seismic tremor at the time.
    Why did you return to Baross Street rather than to Zivatar Street?
    When I went away, Baross Street was the status quo, and when I got home I had no way of knowing that my father had died.
    True, in the novel that’s something you learn from old Fleischmann and Steiner
.
    Köves learns, though as it happened I too was informed of that by the strangers who were living in the house.
    And that important conversation with the two old codgers?
    Pure fiction, though it’s possible we really did talk about something of the kind. As I have said already, the figure of György Köves more closely resembles the person who wrote the novel than the person who actually lived through it. For the person who wrote the novel the situation was important, the cathartic moment when Köves doesn’t just realize but is able to interpret his