We come to every new representation of the Holocaust with particular questions: What does it add to the store of memories that the world has collected in the aftermath of the horror? What is the work of preservation that it undertakes? Based on Fateless, the novel by Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz, Lajos Koltai’s film by the same name is about a fourteen-year-old boy’s journey from Budapest to Buchenwald and back. The film juxtaposes two modes of representation: total aestheticization and a flat, almost journalistic dailiness. How do horror and pain get transposed into memory, the film seems to ask, Do they remain etched in the mind, like a carefully composed photograph, or do they run into one another, like evening into sleep?
Gyuri Koves (Marcel Nagy), the main character, is a perfectly average teenager: he has a crush on a pretty neighbor, he is beginning to look at his parents skeptically, and he is thoughtful, but not profoundly so. Then one day his normalcy is cruelly interrupted: Gyuri is randomly taken off a bus en route to his labor assignment and shoved into a cattle car. After a harrowing, parched journey, he is deposited at Auschwitz and then moved to Buchenwald, where he suffers unspeakable physical hardship, filth, sickness, and hunger.
Fateless is not, like other Holocaust films, the story of a hero (Schindler’s List), the story of a character with great talent and cunning (The Pianist), or the story of the power of humor and playfulness in the face of evil (Life is Beautiful). Its hero is an anti-hero who is, more often than not, an inactive agent who survives misery by sheer luck. At one point, plucked off the shower floor, Gyuri is rescued from the gas chambers with the same gesture that sent him towards Auschwitz in the first place. He is not heroic (we see him engaged in petty acts of trading and theft), and he is not brave.
And yet, Gyuri’s everyman appeal is offset by the film’s moments of sublime beauty—images so arresting that they remain stamped on the brain for days. There is the shot of Gyuri looking up at an SS taskmaster from under a load of coal that he is forced to carry on his back. His face is covered with white powder, and a single tear tracks a black line across his cheek. Another indelible image is of the prisoners in Gyuri’s block, forced to stand in formation all night long. The stripe-suited men tremble with fatigue and cold, fighting to stay standing, swaying as if over a precipice. From the camera’s arial view, it seems as if they are praying, and the dehumanizing stripes on their uniforms become suddenly analogous to prayer garments.
These heightened moments of beauty borrow pain from the most human, barbaric moments, and vice versa. The moment when Gyuri discovers a parasite growing out of a wound on his knee is presented with the same visual boldness as the tragic moment when the camera captures his weeping, powdered face. The raw brutality of a flesh wound is as arresting as the beauty of a face, making it feel even more immediate. At the same time, the slippage between beauty and degradation produces a sort of democratic flatness—something akin to the feeling of lived experience, when mediocrity suddenly gives way to extraordinariness and despair flows into joy, with no breaks in between. Fateless, more than other Holocaust-related films that I have seen, let me live the experience right along with its main character. It is one of the most powerful films of its genre.
