Jacob Rosenberg describes himself as a God-intoxicated agnostic and says he has a degree in remembrance. He talks to Juliette Hughes about his writing and his remarkable life.

'THERE WAS NO time: no past, no future, only the present instant. Your life existed between a yes and a no."

Jacob Rosenberg tells me this as we eat smoked salmon salad. It goes some of the way to explain his patience. We have met in a South Yarra bistro. The lunchtime traffic has made me late and he has been waiting, standing on the outside ramp, his face open and reassuring as I belabour him with apologies.

After reading and reviewing his extraordinary memoir East of Time, I have wanted to find out more about him. There has been some preliminary joking on the phone about how we are going to recognise each other, and we vie in traducing our own appearances.

There is mendacious, teasing talk of an eyepatch and a walking stick; the gentle raillery reminds me of a favourite uncle. In the end we pick each other out immediately. He is slight, straight, dressed in a finely cut sports jacket; no patch, no stick, of course. He looks in good shape for 83.

When we are seated, he hands me a piece of paper that says, in part: ". . . East of Time is a rendezvous of history and imagination; its protagonist is not an individual, but persecuted humanity, a humanity that hoped against all odds to conquer the Sisyphean nightmare, and although they knew they failed, yet still aspired to remain human even at its last frontier of life."

"Sisyphus," I say. "The man who was forever condemned to roll a boulder to the top of a hill, only to have it roll down again to the bottom. Effort, futility, the human condition."

"Yes," he says. "That's the one."

He is an encouraging listener - it is easy to forget that this is supposed to be an interview. At the time I think simply of Camus' Sisyphus essay and the struggle of the conscious being against vast inanities. But for Rosenberg there is more to this image, a connection that reveals itself only after the next meeting.

Some days later he mentions being at Mauthausen, and I've never heard of it. Like most people who haven't lived under a stone, I have heard of the major names of the Holocaust machine: Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau, Treblinka, Chelmno, Buchenwald. Their malignity looms at the edge of all our contemplation of modern history. But this one is new to me.

I look up Mauthausen and read of a Sisyphean nightmare made brutishly physical. Mauthausen-Gusen was a complex of 49 concentration camps about 20 kilometres east of Linz, in Austria. It was notable for its granite quarry, where prisoners had to climb 186 steps carrying 50-kilogram blocks on their backs. Sometimes the guards would force them to race, or to jump to their deaths when they reached the top.

"You survived this," I say to him later. "How? You're not built like a Hercules."

"Once I carried those rocks, those huge pieces. I was young and strong," he replies. "It's all chance. In my next book I show there was no past and no future, there was only the now, the instant. Remember, you lived and died between a yes and a no."

He has said this before - it is a crucial part of the key to his survival in the death camps. I think of the starved young man he was then, living in timeless nows of the weight of the rock, the stairs, his hunger.

It's a couple of weeks later. We are sitting at the Rosenbergs' kitchen table in the afternoon, listening to the rain drumming down, steaming the streets, flooding the gardens. Esther Rosenberg has prepared luscious snacks and coffee. She moves and speaks quietly, smiles warmly. They have one daughter, Marcia, and three grandchildren. We all talk of our children, and what they are doing now.

I ask Rosenberg how he learnt to write so fluently in English.

"I am a compulsive reader," he replies. "By the time I was 16 or 17 I was at home with the French and Russian classics. I have written since I was 15 years old, but necessity made of me a polyglot. English, Polish, Yiddish."

I tell him that I need some sort of CV for the interview. He smiles impishly. "The war finished my primary schooling. My high school was the ghetto. My university was Auschwitz - and postgraduate was Mauthausen with a degree in remembrance!"

East of Time is the first volume of his memoirs. Rosenberg has been writing in Yiddish since he was a teenager. He learnt English when he arrived in Melbourne with Esther in 1948. Like Conrad and Nabokov, he writes in what is effectively a second or third language. Like them, too, his work is significant, literary and fantastically crafted, although his quicksilver fluency, lyricism and profundity are all his own.

Rosenberg says the Bible taught him how to write, that its metaphors inspire direct language. He loves reading the Bible, for although he is not religious, Jewish identity and heritage are utterly vital to him. He tells me about a young boy he met, aged about 11, a keen fan of science fiction. He asked him what would he do if it were proved that there were no other human beings except those who are inhabiting our planet. The boy said: "I would be very lonely."

"I feel like that little boy; to deprive some people of belief in a God would make them lonely. A world without imagination is a cruel world. I am a 'God-intoxicated agnostic'," Rosenberg says. It's a phrase he read concerning Spinoza in Will Durant's Story of Civilisation.

"What kept me fighting for a morsel of life is imagination. Though East of Time is about a specific people, their struggle against the tyranny of evil is absolutely universal. All the personages I wrote about are real. No writer does this consciously. I carry things in my memory, and sometimes my mind is like a gallery of old pictures, of departed days. And I also don't think in words, I think in images: I use words to give them life."

We begin to talk of the liberation. "In a way it was horrible: I was free to go but had nowhere to go; the world was open, but not for me. There was a great cause for celebration but I had no one to celebrate with.

"The Americans freed me. They took care of those in the camps, they brought food, medicine, but they couldn't replace family: they were an army, doing their job. I was in camp after the liberation maybe about three weeks. And then I wanted to get away from the camp, so we started contemplating where to go. The borders were opened and I took the chance to go to Italy.

"But everything was still now - no future, no past. We didn't need tickets - we got onto trains, planes. The US Army didn't ask what you were doing, they just made you free. They were very generous. They made a huge open kitchen in the camp where anyone could go and eat."

We eat more of Esther's delicious things and sip coffee. Then, emboldened by his frankness and resilience, I ask him the question that has been forced on us recently: how does the Holocaust compare with other genocides?

There has been strong pressure to abolish Britain's Holocaust Memorial Day, to call it "Genocide Remembrance Day" instead, as public memory of Nazi atrocities fades. As traces of anti-Semitism start to seep into public discourse once more, it must seem to the Rosenbergs that history is beginning, unthinkably, to repeat itself.

He speaks firmly: "You can't compare the Holocaust to any other genocide, because a legitimate modern government decreed the systematic death of a whole people, including little children."

In Nazi Germany, we see that a mature, modern Western culture, a full recipient of the benefits of the Enlightenment, uniquely conceived and created a bureaucratic and industrial infrastructure specifically to murder healthy human beings who had committed no crime. Other genocides have never matched quite the degree of the Nazis' cold intent: however hideous and unthinkable other genocides were, they seem less premeditated, more simply barbaric than a policy of final solution. Dante would have been able to categorise such degrees of depravity, perhaps, had he not been so disturbingly passive about anti-Semitism. The Holocaust continues to teach us that civilisation itself needs vigilance.

"It takes a long time to make a person good," Rosenberg says, "but only five minutes to make them evil. It's easier to hate than to love. We can all hate: a person has to check himself right through his life not to go astray."

That's what you have done? I ask.

"That's right. I think I might be on secure ground here, but the Ten Commandments have seven negatives."

In Lives and Embers, his short-story collection, there is a vignette of Joseph (of the many-coloured coat) telling how we may become righteous: not by doing something, but by knowing exactly what we must avoid doing.

It's time to speak of better things. I ask Esther Rosenberg how they met. She was shuttled through eight camps before being liberated. She went to Santa Maria al Bagno, a displaced persons' camp in the south of Italy.

It was there that she first saw Jacob reciting one of his Yiddish poems at a wedding. "Then we started meeting one another," she says.

They wanted to get married, but needed a licence that was obtainable only in Nardo, 10 kilometres from the camp. There was no money for bus fare. ("Pockets full of air," they laugh.) An Italian neighbour lent them a donkey and cart. Coming back, a friend gathered some flowers from the fields to make a wedding bouquet for Esther. Back at the camp, Esther's scarf became a tablecloth for their orange-box table. Then she cut four oranges in quarters for their wedding breakfast.

In 1948 they were given passage to Melbourne, and fell in love with the place from the first moment they stepped off the boat. Suddenly there was a future, especially when their daughter was born.

Is there hope now? I say.

Jacob Rosenberg says: "I saw once in a dark basement a green plant climbing a wet wall towards a small opening of light. Will that plant ever reach the light? This is perhaps the very question that confronts all mankind today. If that plant doesn't reach the light, we are doomed. If we don't find a common denominator that will give us a sense of universality, of common humanity, we are going to blow up this planet, no question. It seems to me that the world is on the brink of suicide.

"But I have hope because I think of the green plant, looking for the light."

East of Time is published by Brandl & Schlesinger at $26.95. This week it was shortlisted for the ASL Gold Medal.

Jacob Rosenberg

1922 born Lodz, Poland. Educated at the Vladimir Medem school, founded by the Bund.

1939 On outbreak of war, the family is sent to the Lodz ghetto. The Rosenbergs are sent to Auschwitz then Gross-Rosen in 1944. All but Jacob murdered.

May 1945 Jacob Rosenberg liberated in May 1945. Moved to a displaced persons' camp in Italy and there marries Esther Laufer, a survivor of eight camps who had been in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

1948 Migrate to Australia in 1948 and live in Melbourne. They have one daughter, Marcia, and three grandchildren. Some of his works have been translated into Russian, Ukrainian and Hebrew.

1984 Publishes Snow in Spring in Yiddish, followed by Wooden Clogs Shod with Snow (1988) and Light-Shadow-Light (1992).

2003 Lives and Embers in English. Other works in English includes three volumes of poetry: My Father's Silence, Twilight Whisper and Behind the Moon.

2005 East of Time

2006 East of Time shortlisted for ALS Gold Medal.