Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:
It's not often that a book or a movie makes me cry. A few weeks ago I watched Fateless, a film that brought tears to my eyes. For quite some time afterwards I could not get over the sepia tinted images of melancholy, gloom and suffering. Even more difficult to shake off was the impression made by the detached incomprehension of the young protagonist caught in the violent maelstrom.
Fateless is based on a novel by Imre Kertesz, a 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 (Gyorgy ) Koves (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. Through it all we experience the young boy's plight not as mere viewers but often as “Gyuri,” the teenager who has been transported from a life of middle class predictability to one of unfamiliar, unprecedented horror which is in equal parts, carefully planned out regimental cruelty and random violence. As Primo Levi pointed out in his brilliant books about Auschwitz, one needs some distance in time and place from carnage and degradation to truly recognize the scars left by past traumas. With proximity to pain, over time, mindless brutality and soul sapping privation can begin to look routine and mundane. And tragedy is multiplied many times over when children's fates are shaped by the corruption of the adult soul.
More here.