Dear Victor,

I would like to echo your reflections on man's response to cruelties of fate with another book recommendation. A book whose message for me was quite opposite to Frankl's, perhaps dangerously optimistic sounding, quote.

The Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, who until 2002 was virtually unknown both in and outside of his country, says in his Nobel acceptance speech:

I stood in the empty corridor of an office building, and all that happened was that from the direction of another, intersecting corridor I heard echoing footsteps. A strange excitement took hold of me. The sound grew louder and louder, and though they were clearly the steps of a single, unseen person, I suddenly had the feeling that I was hearing the footsteps of thousands. It was as if a huge procession was pounding its way down that corridor. And at that point I perceived the irresistible attraction of those footfalls, that marching multitude. In a single moment I understood the ecstasy of self-abandonment, the intoxicating pleasure of melting into the crowd ... It was almost as though some physical force were pushing me, pulling me toward the unseen marching columns. I felt I had to stand back and press against the wall, to keep me from yielding to this magnetic, seductive force.

I wouldn't classify the experience as an artistic revelation, but rather as an existential self-discovery. What I gained from it was not my art - its tools would not be mine for some time - but my life, which I had almost lost. The experience was about solitude, a more difficult life, and the things I have already mentioned - the need to step out of the mesmerizing crowd, out of History, which renders you faceless and fateless. To my horror, I realized that ten years after I had returned from the Nazi concentration camps, and halfway still under the awful spell of Stalinist terror, all that remained of the whole experience were a few muddled impressions, a few anecdotes. Like it didn't even happen to me, as people are wont to say.

In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense... It is as if, after a night of terrible dreams, one looked around the world, defeated, helpless. I have never tried to see the complex of problems referred to as the Holocaust merely as the insolvable conflict between Germans and Jews. I never believed that it was the latest chapter in the history of Jewish suffering, which followed logically from their earlier trials and tribulations. I never saw it as a one-time aberration, a large-scale pogrom, a precondition for the creation of Israel. What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.

The two images from your article I was first going to take away with me were that of a brutal Capo and the man giving out his morning ration of bread.

I stopped myself, however, for I found this impression deeply disconcerting. I grew up in the heart of Europe, the Europe that inexorably brought the suicidal experience called 20th century upon herself, indeed, I grew up an easy five hour train ride from Auschwitz that is still there.

It was precisely these two images that we were spoonfed in institutions of learning starting from kindergarten that made me and my buddies numb to this particular historical experience to the point we would fight for the privilige to be a Capo in our own after school game. But somehow we were sensitive enough to our own experience in the promised land of better society that we would never give out that bread in the game, we could not be duped into harboring hopes about each other's good intentions.

Twenty years passed and in 2002, on my Hungarian friend's recommendation, I read the Czech translation of Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz, a writer who in that year won the Nobel prize for literature. "For writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history." For that one fateless book.

What I found most cathartic about reliving the experience of arriving on the Buchenwald train platform was the realization of my own total annihilation, as a European, and as a human.

The book led to ruminations that triggered an illness, for which I am genetically predisposed, the doctors say, that kept me captive in my own hell of sorts for two years.

I, too, was an exception, for I came out. At least for now. But that total annihilation of my own self and of the inkling to fall captive to any of the hopes that I constantly form and on which I live was the beginning of new life. Indeed, Auschwitz is the last, but also the first, freedom.

I look forward to your tomorrow's post.

Honza