Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian writer who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature for fiction largely drawn from his very real experience as a teenage prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, died Thursday. He was 86.

Book publishing firm Magveto Kiado said Kertesz died at 4 a.m. at his Budapest home after a long illness.
Kertesz was only 14 when he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1944. He survived that camp and later was transferred to the Buchenwald camp from where he was liberated in 1945.

"As a child you have a certain trust in life. But when something like Auschwitz happens, everything falls apart," he once said.

Yet Kertesz also made a startling confession that he experienced "my most radical moments of happiness" while at Auschwitz.