If a child is the human objectification of the future, the one who has not been born is the painful confirmation of its absence. Collective history often takes the value of an example from the individual and his suffering. Thus, in this "Kaddish for the Unborn Child," Kertész makes a painful self-analysis, brutal, heartbreaking, and uncompromising, of "the traumatic event of Western civilization," which he himself suffered directly, and in which he establishes a connection between the long shadow cast by Auschwitz and the impossible of fatherhood. In this book, a man speaks of himself, but his confession catapults toward the collective.