Quote by Imre Kertész: “I was born in Budapest in 1929 and the twentieth century immediately showed me its face.”

To be born in a particular year in a particular place is to be handed a specific historical fate. Kertész is saying his entire life story — the Holocaust, communist Hungary, displacement — was encoded in the time and place of his birth, which he had no control over. History is not abstract; it arrives as a personal destiny.

Kertész delivered his Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm in December 2002. By then, Fatelessness had finally received wide international recognition. He used the lecture to meditate on the relationship between individual fate and historical forces — on how being born Jewish in Budapest in 1929 set the trajectory of his entire life before he was old enough to make any choices.

Hungarian novelist and Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. His novel Fatelessness, based on his experiences as a teenage prisoner in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is considered one of the most important literary responses to the Holocaust. He argued that the Holocaust was not an aberration but a product of modernity.