George Koves is a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy who, shortly after his father was ordered away to a "labor camp", is taken with a group of young boys to a German concentration camp. This occurs during the last year of World War II, and although the crematoriums he saw still appeared to be active, George survives what he defines as his "given fate."

George's imprisoned group was made up of Jews and Gypsies, both of whom were labeled as "sinners", and a cult of Muslims, but their work was controlled by other convicts. The German SS seldom appeared in any of the concentration camps. But the prisoners knew each other only by numbers, so one inmate called this their "heavenly phone number."

Most of their days were spent at hard labor, and their meals only consisted of soup and bread, which they would now and then use for trading. But thirst often becomes more of a problem than hunger. A Rabbi, who was also a prisoner, tried to escape these problems with his religious faith, but George ignored this because he "preferred sleeping to praying."

Many of the prisoners realized there were only three means of escape. One way was to let their imaginations keep active. Another was to stay asleep too long and then be beaten to death for it. The last way was fleeing from the camp, which two Muslims tried, but were killed for doing so.

But because of the forced labor they had to endure, and the small servings of food, their physical health degenerated rapidly. George thought that his body had deserted him and complained that he "no longer lived inside it." He admitted that the "Cold, wetness, wind or rain no longer disturbed me."

When his knee became infected and he no longer could walk, he was taken into the medical section of the camp, where the living conditions were more pleasant. "I couldn't have wished for more than this in a concentration camp," he admitted. He found nothing to praise, but he felt little resentment.

But when the war ended and he was sent home to Budapest, his passive attitude was questioned and sometimes challenged by many neighbors and relatives, who still needed something to hate and blame for the tragedies of the war.

Imre Kertesz writes of his teenage imprisonment at Auschwitz as a novel and approached the WWII holocaust from an unusual angle. His narrator George finds little to actually hate, and Nazis are rarely mentioned. He is too interested in his fellow prisoners and is satisfied that "Everyone stepped forward as long as he could."

FATELESS was Kertesz's first novel and was written in 1975. It was chosen as a Nobel Prize winner in 2002.