Arnost Lustig
Arnost Lustig was a Czech Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, born on December 21, 1926, in Prague. His early life was drastically altered by the Nazi occupation, leading to his family's deportation to Theresienstadt, and subsequently to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After escaping in 1945, Lustig dedicated himself to recounting the experiences and horrors of the Holocaust, focusing particularly on the moral strength and resilience of individuals, often through the lens of fiction. His notable works include "Noc a nadeje," "Dita Saxová," and "Modlitba pro Katerinu Horovitzovou," which explore themes of survival, guilt, and the complexities of human morality in the face of extreme adversity.
Lustig's literary career blossomed despite political challenges, particularly after the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia. He emigrated and taught at American University, where he continued to explore the moral implications of genocide and the human capacity for courage. Throughout his life, he received several international accolades for his writing and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lustig's work serves as a powerful testament to the enduring impact of trauma and the importance of memory in preventing future atrocities. His legacy remains a vital part of Holocaust literature and a reminder of the human spirit's tenacity amidst overwhelming darkness.
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Arnost Lustig
Author
- Born: December 21, 1926
- Birthplace: Prague, Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic)
- Died: February 26, 2011
- Place of death: Prague, Czech Republic
Biography
Arnost Lustig was born on December 21, 1926, in the Liben district of Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), into a middle-class Jewish family. His schooling was interrupted by the Nazi occupation in 1939, when Lustig was conscripted to work at a tailor’s shop and then at a leather works factory. In 1942, Lustig and his family were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later sent to the notorious camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In the latter camp, Lustig worked in a munitions factory, but he escaped in the spring of 1945 and made his way back to Prague, where he remained until the end of World War II.
After the war, Lustig knew he needed to tell the story of the concentration camp horrors that had killed so many of his family members. Sanctioned by the state because of his affiliation with the Communist Party, Lustig began work as a journalist and later became involved with the burgeoning Czech film industry. However, it was his fiction, beginning with Noc a nadeje (1958; Night and Hope 1962), that marked Lustig’s growing reputation as a witness to the Holocaust. Lustig’s fiction focused on individuals, most often older Jews or children, who despite the harrowing conditions, asserted moral strength and profound courage.
During the next decade, Lustig returned to his camp experiences with moral vigor in works that established him as a major figure in Czech literature. In Dita Saxová (1962; Dita Sax, 1966), a young Jewish woman who has survived the Holocaust cannot adjust to her postwar guilt over her survival and commits suicide; in Modlitba pro Katerinu Horovitzovou (1964; A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, 1985), a girl in the camps, facing her own extermination, shoots a Nazi military officer in the anteroom of one of the gas chambers; in Z deníku sedmnáctileté Perly Sch. (1979; The Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S., 1985), a young Jewish girl, desperate to survive, passes for German in a camp brothel and ultimately is unable to feel any emotion as she must service the very people who run the camps that are exterminating her people. Given Lustig’s significant background in film, his novels were charged with a driving sense of suspense, a compelling sense of characters caught in complicated dilemmas, and a flair for the dramatic closing.
Lustig’s pro-Israel views were found suspect by the new Soviet government installed in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet crackdown on Czech resistance in 1968. He began a two-year journey that would include stops in Israel, Italy, Yugoslavia, and the United States. In 1973, he accepted a position teaching both creative writing and film studies at American University in Washington, D.C. His work since then has reflected a deep moral sensibility about those caught up in the merciless evil of the Nazi’s Final Solution.
After the fall of Communism, Lustig reestablished ties with his Czech homeland and continued to speak and write tirelessly about the Holocaust experience, seeing in that horrific event a nightmarish template for what would become a century of genocide and ethnic cleansing. His work has been awarded numerous international literary prizes, and he has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature. By probing the implications of genocide, Lustig speaks of the human will to survive and the exertion of courage under enormous psychological and physical duress.