How Is The Film "Fateless" Different From Other Movies On The Holocaust?

Fateless is a Hungarian film which came out in 2004 and is based on Imre Kertész's novel on a young Hungarian Jew who is deported from Budapest and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature for the partially autobiographical work in 2003.

The film Fateless, however, appears to send a different message than other major movies on the Holocaust, such as Schindler's List or The Pianist. When Fateless's protagonist, the 14 year old Gyurka, is deported from Hungary, he finds himself in a concentration camp with primarily Hungarian Jewish prisoners and a small minority of Latvian and other Eastern European Jews. Despite the horrific brutality of life in the camp and the inhumane behaviour of the German guards, Gyurka feels a sense of community, kinship and belonging with the other Hungarian Jews in the camp.

When the camp is finally liberated in May 1945, Gyurka makes his way back home to Budapest, but finds that everyone is only interested in hearing about the horrors of the concentration camp, while he appears to most fondly remember and even miss the sense of camaradery and community among the prisoners. Once he is back in Budapest, however, Gyurka feels as though he is an outsider and "different," and is treated as such by old family friends. It is then that Gyurka feels a strange sense of nostalgia for certain hours of the day in the camp, such as dinner time, when that sense of community among the Hungarian Jews was the strongest.

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