Kertesz is a writer and Holocaust concentration camp survivor. His best known work, Fatelessness, describes the experience of a fifteen-year-old in the concentration camps Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Zeitz. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
 

"As we pass one step, and as we recognize it as being behind us, the next one already rises up before us. By the time we learn everything, we slowly come to understand it. And while you come to understand everything gradually, you don't remain idle at any moment: you are already attending to your new business; you live, you act, you move, you fulfill the new requirements of every new step of development. If, on the other hand, there were no schedule, no gradual enlightenment, if all the knowledge descended on you at once right there in one spot, then it's possible neither your brains nor your heart could bear it."

— Imre Kertesz, Fatelessness