The suffocating legacy of the Holocaust is the subject of most of Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz's books, but he has also written about survival under communism.

Kertesz, now 74 and suffering from Parkinson's disease, turned his pen in his latest novel "Liquidation", published here last year, to surviving four decades of communism and the ensuing transition to freedom and democracry.

Kertesz is an example of the sort of "new Europeans" in the countries set to join the European Union on May 1.

"A world came undone, and though this world was a world of prisons, even the release from prison is traumatic," Kertesz said last year at a press conference presenting "Liquidation".

"This book struggles with these traumas," he said.

As a teenager, Kertesz was one of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews deported to concentration camps in 1944.

His unflinching look at life in the camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald was the subject of his first and most famous novel, "Fateless", which won him the Nobel prize in 2002.

The Swedish Nobel committee said the book, written from the point of view of a child, "upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history."

Kertesz returned to Hungary after the end of World War II and started working as a journalist for the daily Vilagossag in Budapest beginning in 1948.

He soon found himself out of a job, however, after he was fired in 1951 for failing to toe the communist party line.

Living in relative obscurity in the next decades under the communist dictatorship, Kertesz struggled to confront through his writing the unbearable weight of his childhood trauma.

Unlike others who decided to stay silent about the Holocaust, Kertesz ripped open the scar of Auschwitz and finally managed to publish "Fateless" in

"Between 1961 and 1973, I restarted 'Fateless' 500 times to find the distance and structure, the framework in which the words could have their own lives," Kertesz said.

Though some critics have labeled Kertesz as a "Holocaust writer", the Nobel laureate has strongly rejected this.

"Liquidation" is the story of a literary editor's struggle to survive and find meaning in the Hungary of the 1990s after the collapse of communism in 1989 and the suicide of his close friend soon afterward.

The novel's protagonists are weighed down by history and find that reaching the goals of freedom and democracy can, ironically, cause problems for those whose lives were defined by resistance to authoritarianism.

"When one has pushed against a wall with all his might and soul and when that wall suddenly gives, there is no more enemy, life is broken and there is a feeling of despondency," Kertesz said.