Arnošt Lustig (1926–2011)

Arnošt Lustig was born to a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1942, at age 15, he was deported by the Nazis to the concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt), then to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He was on a train headed for Dachau in 1945 when the engine was hit and disabled by an American bomber plane. He escaped and returned to Prague, where he fought with the Resistance. After the war, he studied journalism at Charles University in Prague and later worked as a magazine editor, script writer,, and radio reporter. He covered the1948 Israeli War of Independence from Israel, where he met his future wife, Věra Weislitzová, also a Holocaust survivor. With his literary work gaining recognition starting in the late 1950s, his was a vital voice in Czechoslovakia during the build up to the Prague Spring of 1968. He was a close friend of Václav Havel, the dissent leader and future president. When "socialism with a human face" was crushed by the Soviets, the Lustigs emigrated to the USA, where he taught for many years at American University. He and his wife returned often to Prague after the fall of communism and retired there in 2004. He wrote more than 20 books and volumes of short stories; many, if not all, were about the Holocaust. His best-known work is perhaps the novel A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, published in the USA in 1973. Several of his works were adapted into movies; Lustig was also the subject of the award-winning 2000 documentary film Fighter.