Nobel Prize winning Hungarian author Kertesz laid to rest

Imre Kertesz, the only Hungarian to win a Nobel Prize in literature, was buried on Friday in the Budapest Fiume road cemetery.

The funeral was attended by hundreds of people including the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, German Bundestag President Norbert Lammert, Hungarian government officials and representatives of Hungary's cultural and literary circle.

Hungarian author Gyorgy Spiro paid tribute to Kertesz, calling him "the freest man I had ever known during the depressing and hopeless decades."

"He came to know the world in a dark era, holding Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Camus and Kafka as torchlight in his hands," Spiro added.

Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy said at the funeral that "quiet, restlessness and affliction" would be great Kertesz words that teach us something new about ourselves, about our country, our world and about God. We must read Kertesz's texts over and over again, he said.

Kertesz died at age 86 after a lengthy and serious illness on March 31. He was granted the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."

Kertesz, who was Jewish, was deported to the Auschwitz German concentration camp at the age of 14 in 1944, and eventually sent to Buchenwald.

His best-known works include Fatelessness, Kaddish for a Child Not Born, and Liquidation. Enditem