Nationality 1: Jewish

Birthdate: 1929

Imre Kertész was born November 9, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary. In 1944, when Kertész was only fifteen years old he was sent with 7,000 other Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. He was later transferred to Buchenwald, Germany. Kertész was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.

Kertész returned to Hungary and worked as a journalist for the Budapest newspaper Világosság. Although he had joined the Communist Party, Kertész found, in practice, that he did not agree with many of its tenets. He was fired from the newspaper in 1951 after it adopted the Communist Party line to be in compliance with the Communist government of Hungary. Kertész was in the military for two years before he decided to support himself exclusively by writing and working as a...