Mr. Kertesz seemed dumbfounded by his Nobel Prize, which came after he had spent decades in near anonymity, even in Hungary. He had a small but intensely loyal following in Germany, France and Scandinavia, but only two of his novels, “Fateless” and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” (1990), had been published in English when he received the award.

Imre Kertesz (roughly pronounced EEM-er-eh CARE-tiss) was born in Budapest on Nov. 9, 1929, to secular Jewish parents and grew up as a nonobservant Jew. His death camp internment, however, “obliged me to be Jewish,” he said in a 2001 interview with the Spanish newspaper El País.

“I accept it,” he added, “but to a large extent it is also true that it was imposed on me.”

While Mr. Kertesz urged readers and critics not to assume that the events recounted in “Fateless” were autobiographical, the novel contains strong parallels to his own experiences. At age 14, on his way to school, he was — like Gyuri Koves, the teenage protagonist of “Fateless’’ — caught in a Hungarian police dragnet in 1944 and deported along with thousands of other Budapest Jews, first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald.

Following the advice of older camp inmates, the young Kertesz, also like the fictional Koves, claimed to be a 16-year-old worker rather than a student. That made him old enough to qualify for forced labor, saving him from immediate extermination as a child.

A macabre reminder of this successful ruse surfaced when Mr. Kertész was preparing his Nobel acceptance speech. He received a large brown envelope in the mail from the director of the Buchenwald Memorial Center. Enclosed, besides a congratulatory note, was a routine report, compiled by the Buchenwald camp authorities and dated Feb. 18, 1945, listing the names of inmates who had died that day. One notation read: “Imre Kertesz, factory worker, born in 1927.”