Fateless..........beyond agony and pain

If there’s one event in history which redefined the way mankind perceived itself and other fellow humans , altered the course of the world forever it was the second world war ,from the year 1940 to 1945 the world experienced hell on earth , words like holocaust , adversity, suffering became part of everybody ‘s everyday life,  those who lived that era have always lived with adversity as their constant companion,  viewed free will and fate and the meaning of life on different terms than others.  It’s got nothing to do with being suicidal, and nothing to do with not loving life.  It just is what it is.  What else could it be?

I thought about all this a lot while watching the movie Fateless (2005) ; Fateless is based on a novel by Imre Kertesz, the Nobel Prize winning Hungarian author who spent a year in Nazi concentration camps as a young boy. The movie is the account of one year in the life of fourteen year old Gyuri Koves,  as some have speculated, Kertesz himself, after being shipped to Auschwitz, later shifted to Buchenwald and finally to Zeitz, a lesser known concentration camp in 1944.The film opens with Gyuri’s father being sent to a concentration camp , it very effectively captures the fear on their faces ,  their mute acceptance of the fate destined to them or the lack of it , the helplessness that one cannot escape , the horror on the faces of parents knowing that their son is going on the journey to death , the innocence of a fourteen year old unaware that he shares the common fate that of his father and millions of other Jews, that he cries unexpectedly and unknowingly when his father hugs him before leaving.

Fateless doesn’t glorify the holocaust, or it romanticizes the pain and suffering originated from of the second world war like most Hollywood movies do , but it narrates them as they were , in small sepia montages it forces us to feel them , it doesn’t commit the folly of telling us about  the feeling . Its unique perspective (from the recollections of a 14 year old boy) is its place in time, and that time is the moment at hand. Through a series of bleak images about the grim realities that gyuri faces, which transform him from a boy to a man. Gyuri’s stoic acceptance of disease, malnourishment and Nazi atrocities makes you visit those situations in your own imagination, it transcends the barrier of cinema and you become an active participant in the boy’s struggle.

But  fateless is not a sad and depressing film , it’s a film that makes you introspect , there are moments that makes you smile, adversity is the biggest teacher in the world and the movie asserts the point well , a piece of meat that accidentally features in a soup shocks and amazes many, one lies next to a dead body in a hospital and keeps mum about the fact as speaking would prohibit the ration that he was taking in the name of the dead person , in such ghastly moments people do find moments to laugh and sing. The individual instances of loss, pain and indignities suffered, add up to an atrocity of monumental proportions. But these people living in hell survive on only one thing; hope. That one day they will go back, I read somewhere that hope is something that you cling to when you have nothing else left. That’s how the fourteen year old survives , the holocaust is over for him and the world but the nightmare remains and he has to live in it , his normal emotions come back when he returns to Budapest , only to find himself deprived of everything he dreamt about , people who shared the common fate with him , now want to live in constant denial , even his family and friends do not want to hear what went in the camps , for them it’s a thing of the past , but for Gyuri its not when he is back  on the road he thinks back on his life in the camp which now seems less confusing to him than the freedom outside., the camps are not the past. They are his present reality and they will remain so for the rest of his life. The movie concludes as he recalls wistfully that the year spent in the camps was not one of just horror and suffering; there were "magic hours" there too. He thinks back on his favorite hour, just after dinner, a respite from the day's backbreaking labor, ["which I waited for and loved most in the camp"] when he would joke and sing with his fellow prisoners. As Imre Kertész said in his Nobel speech “in my writings the holocaust can never be in past tense”

To most of us, watching movies about the Second World War mostly makes us ponder on the question: what would I have done? How would I have behaved?  In this way somehow we make peace with the fact, or somehow make ourselves believe that we have experienced something, or would have survived a suffering that surpasses comprehension. Fateless works the other way it shows us what it might have been like to endure atrocity as a form of ordinary reality, which is probably the hardest thing to do.