Holocaust Survivor Wins Lit Prize

Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian who survived Auschwitz as a teenager, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for writing that "upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."

The Swedish Academy singled out his 1975 debut novel, "Sorstalansag" ("Fateless"), in which he writes about a young man who is arrested and taken to a concentration camp but conforms and survives.

"For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence," the academy said. "It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern experience."

The 72-year-old Kertesz, a Jew born in Budapest, was deported in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, then to the Buchenwald camp in Germany, where he was liberated in 1945. Some 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Kertesz described the prize as the biggest surprise in his life, and is the highlight of the writing career he dedicated to his experiences in Auschwitz, reports CBS News Correspondent Stefan Bos in Budapest.

He is the first Hungarian to win the award.

Professor Peter Sherwood, of University College London, said Hungarian's uniqueness as a language has kept its authors from reaching a wide global audience.

"The English translations, I don't think are very widely available, but no doubt this will change things," he told CBS News Correspondent Steve Holt.

"There is no awareness of the Holocaust in Hungary. People have not faced up to the Holocaust," Kertesz told The Associated Press in Berlin, where he is currently on a teaching scholarship. "I hope that in the light of this recognition, they will face up to it more than until now."

Kertesz was honored for writing "that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history," in the citation by the Swedish Academy.

The academy said Kertesz's writings explore the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which people are severely repressed by society.

"The refusal to compromise in Kertesz's stance can be perceived clearly in his style, which is reminiscent of a thickset hawthorn hedge, dense and thorny for unsuspecting visitors," the academy said.

Author Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor who won the Nobel peace prize in 1986, said Thursday that he "applauded" the academy's decision.

"He is a great writer," Wiesel said. "His style and his approach are of such high quality that he deserved to be given the highest prize in literature."

"Fateless" was the first of a trilogy of novels reflecting on the Holocaust. In "A kudarc" ("Fiasco"), published in 1988, an aging author writes a novel about Auschwitz that he expects to be rejected. When the book, to his surprise, is published, he feels only emptiness and a loss privacy.

"Kaddish a meg nem szueletetett" ("Kaddish For a Child Not Born"), the third work of the trilogy, is a short novel published in 1990. The narrator is a middle-aged Holocaust survivor who has become a writer and literary translator. He agonizes over the effects of his past, lamenting he cannot raise a child in so cruel a world and looking back on a failed marriage and disappointing career.

Kertesz's other works include such nonfiction collections as "The Holocaust as Culture," "Moments of Silence While the Execution Squad Reloads" and "The Exiled Language."

Only two of his books, "Fateless" and "Kaddish," have been translated into English and Kertesz is hopeful the award will enable more works to become available. The Nobel winner in 2000, Gao Xingjian, was also little-known by English-language readers, but now has several of his books in translation.

The Nobel award is worth about $1 million.

"He sees what is human in everything although he has gone through such atrocities," Maria Dugantsy Becker, an expert in Finno-Ugric languages at Sweden's Uppsala University.

Kertesz briefly worked as a journalist for the newspaper Vilagossag after his return to Hungary in the late 1940s.

He also writes stories, essays and plays and translates literature and philosophy from German into Hungarian, including Nietzsche and Freud.

In "Fateless," Kertesz uses the "alienating device" of taking the reality of the camp for granted.

"The shocking credibility of the description derives perhaps from this very absence of any element of the moral indignation or metaphysical protest that the subject cries out for," the academy said.

Kertesz himself has said, "If I think of a new book, I always think of Auschwitz," according to the academy.

The 18 lifetime members of the 216-year-old Swedish Academy make the annual selection in deep secrecy at one of their weekly meetings and do not even reveal the date of the announcement until two days beforehand.

Nominees are not revealed publicly for 50 years, leaving the literary world to only guess about who was in the running. However, many of the same critically acclaimed authors are believed to be on the short list every year.

Last year's award went to perennial favorite V.S. Naipaul, a British novelist and essayist born in Trinidad to parents of Indian descent.

A week of Nobel Prizes started Monday with the medicine award, followed Tuesday by physics and Wednesday by chemistry and economics.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner will be named Friday in Oslo, Norway, the only Nobel not awarded in Sweden.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who endowed the awards, gave only vague guidance about the prize, saying in his will that it should go to those who "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind" and "who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."

The prizes always are presented Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.