Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész has died aged 86, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
The Hungarian writer, who was sent to the Nazi death camp as a teenager, was made a Nobel laureate in 2002 for works which the foundation said “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”
The author also endured communist rule in Hungary but remained a strong critic of the establishment, issuing uncomfortable reminders of his country’s complicity in the Holocaust.
In his most famous work, Fateless - also known as Fatelessness - he described the Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz concentration camps through the eyes of fictional Hungarian 14-year-old György Köves.
He denied that the tale, later made into a film of the same name for which he wrote the screenplay, was autobiographical.
His later works, Fiasco and Kaddish for a Child not Born, were seen as the sequels in an eventual trilogy of stories about the Holocaust.
The author, who died at his home in Budapest, was born in the Hungarian capital in 1929. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, then moved to Buchenwald, where US soldiers liberated the camp at the end of the war.
On his return to Hungary he became a journalist, but was dismissed from his job in 1951 when his newspaper adopted the ruling Communist Party line.
Speaking to The New Yorker in 2013, Mr Kertész explained that as a 15-year-old imprisoned in death camps, his survival of the Shoah was down to “trust in the world”.
He explained: “I simply supposed that the adult world had a duty to save me from that and get me home in one piece. That sounds rather funny today, but it really was the way I felt.
“I firmly believe that I have that childish trust to thank for my being rescued.”
To get more news, click here to sign up for our free daily newsletter.