Imre Kertesz: Nobel Prize Laureate and Holocaust survivor dies aged 86

Kertesz was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager

(REUTERS)

Hungarian writer and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz, who won the 2002 Nobel Literature Prize, has died at the age of 86.

Kertesz's publisher told state news agency MTI he passed away on Thursday morning at his Budapest home after a long illness.

Kertesz won the Nobel Prize for works the judges said portrayed the Nazi death camps as “the ultimate truth” about how low human beings could fall. Judges also said his writing "upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". In his acceptance speech, he said he only wrote the novel for himself. "I didn't have an audience and didn't want to influence anyone."

Born in Budapest in 1929, Kertesz was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager along with thousands of Hungarian Jews. He was then transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was liberated from in 1945. He reportedly once said: "As a child you have a certain trust in life. But when something like Auschwitz happens, everything falls apart."

Following liberation, he lived most of his life between Budapest and Berlin.

His best-known novel, Fatelessness, described the experience of a 15-year-old boy in concentration camps and was published in 1975 after a decade-long struggle to have it published.

He is survived by his wife Magda.

Additional reporting by Reuters and Associated Press.