How can you be so … so …

Cynical?

I didn’t want to say it.

You won’t offend me, I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that’s just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.

In that case, let me ask: What did you feel that night, when you had not yet acquired that … I would not say cynicism so much as irony to maintain you detachment? The irony with which, after all, you came face to face with death? Weren’t you afraid?

I probably was, but I no longer recall. What was much more important, though, was a kind of recognition that I managed to formulate many years later in “Fiasco”: “I grasped the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time.”

A devastating realization.

Yes, and yet also not. You know, it is not so easy to dampen the joie de vivre of a fourteen-year-old boy, especially if he is surrounded by pals of the same age who are sharing his fate. There is a … an unspoiled innocence about him that protects him from a sense of being completely defenseless, completely without hope. In that sense, an adult can be broken much more quickly.

Is that perception based on your own experiences, or is it something you heard or read about later on?

It was something that I both observed for myself and also read about. Look, let’s be frank here. Among the masses of books on the subject on the same sort of subject only very few are truly able genuinely to put into words the unparalleled experience of being in the Nazi death camps. And it is perhaps the essays of Jean Améry that say the most, even among those exceptional authors. He has a superbly precise word: Weltvertrauen, which I would translate as “trust in the world.” Well, he writes about how hard it is to live without that trust, and once a person has lost it he is condemned to perpetual solitude among people. A person like that will never again be able to see fellow men but only ever anti-men (Mitmenschen and Gegenmenschen are the original expressions). That trust was beaten out of Améry by the Gestapo when he was tortured in Fort Breendonk, a Belgian fort that was set up as a prison. In vain did he survive Auschwitz; decades later he carried out the sentence on himself by committing suicide.

This excerpt is drawn from “Dossier K,” by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson, to be published by Melville House on May 7, 2013.