Fateless focuses on the personal experiences of Gyuri Koves, a 14-year old Jewish boy living in Budapest at the time of the Nazi occupation. As the film begins, Gyuri's father has received a notice that he is to be taken to a labor camp . As the family spends the last night with Gyuri's father, everyone tries to dismiss the horrid rumors that they have heard and they try to remain strong and positive as to what his fate will be in the labor camp. Hoping for the best but deep down inside knowing the worst, they must say their goodbyes as he goes off to his unknown fate. The young Gyuri does not really understand the seriousness of what is going on around him but soon discovers that his world has completely changed and his breezy childhood days are gone forever.

While on his way to work one day, Gyuri is arrested and taken to Auschwitz labor/death camp. Claiming to be 16 years-old and therefore old enough for hard labor (in the eyes of the Nazis), he is allowed to live instead of being sent to the gas chamber. He experiences more than a lifetime of cruelty and deprivation in the span of one year as he is bounced around between various concentration and death camps. From Auschwitz he is sent to Buchenwald and from there he is sent to a smaller concentration camp named Zeitz. From Zeitz he is then sent back to Buchenwald. It is not long before the conditions take their toll on him and he becomes skeletal, full of fleas and scabs, and develops a terribly painful and grotesquely swollen knee due to an infection. After he is unable to walk he is taken to the camp doctor who attempts to clean the wound but does so unsuccessfully and Gyuri's infection becomes worse.

Despite his terrible surroundings, Gyuri finds a way to cope and even finds some happiness within his circumstances. He fights back against his captors by not letting them take away his spirit. He finds some comfort in the friends that he has made, especially a fellow Hungarian named Bandi Citrom, who takes Gyuri on as a younger brother and teaches him skills to make it within the camp and looks out for him during dangerous situations. Gyuri develops a special bond with his camp mates, and he relishes the end of each work day when all is quiet and supper is served and he gets to sit with them and commiserate and also find laugher and humanity even in the hell of a Nazi death camp.

The film also touches on an area of the Holocaust experience that is rarely seen - the return home after the war.  It should be noted that many viewers took issue with this film's portrayal of Gyuri when he had returned to Hungary after the liberation.  The issue that irked people was his longing for the "happy times"  and comaraderie that he had experienced during his imprisonment with his camp mates.  I think that this issue is very complex and should be seen within the context of that particular time.  Upon the liberation of the camps, when the inmates returned home they found themselves feeling exceedingly isolated from the rest of the population.  The emotional trauma of their experiences prevented them from being able to blend back into the routine of society and even their families and closest friends could not relate to and understand their sufferings.  And as the population strove for a return normalcy after years of war, many turned their backs on the skeletal Holocaust survivors, many of whom had no homes to go to anymore as they had been either destroyed by the bombings or taken over by non-Jews.   Feeling as though they were strangers all alone in the world, the damaged Holocaust survivors found solace in their fellow survivors, the only ones that could relate to and understand them.   

The cinematography of Fateless is spectacular, especially the concentration camp scenes. With the brilliant camera work and washed out color, the atmosphere becomes palpable. There are powerful performances all around, especially from Marcell Nagy as Gyuri and Aron Dimeny as Bandi and Daniel Craig as an American soldier who participates in the liberation of Buchenwald. Fateless is a very powerful and moving personal story of life amid a time of horror.