Arnošt Lustig passed away in Prague yesterday after a five-year battle with cancer.
In the summer of 1999 I interviewed the uniquely spirited Czech author and our conversation was published in the New England Review later that year.
This served as the introduction:
Seventy-two-year-old Arnošt Lustig spent most of his adolescence in Nazi concentration camps including Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. He escaped imprisonment by jumping from a transport train bound for Dachau. For the next twenty years, the author lived in Prague, leaving after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Eventually he emigrated to the United States and settled in Washington, D.C. where he taught at American University.
Besides serving as an important figure in Czech New Wave cinema, Lustig has published thirteen books of fiction, eight of which have been translated into English. Each is set in Central Europe between the years 1939 and 1947. Darkness Casts No Shadow, Lustig's most autobiographical novel, tells the story of two young boys who escape a train destined for a Nazi death camp. A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, nominated for the National Book Award in 1974, relates the trials of twenty naive American Jews, captured while vacationing in Italy in 1945, and one young Polish woman whose family has just been sent to the gas chamber. Lustig's short novel, The Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S, the story of a young prostitute in Theresienstadt, won the National Jewish Book Award in 1985. A screenplay for the documentary Precious Legacy won an Emmy in 1981.
The author currently divides his time between Washington, D.C. and Prague, where this interview was conducted.
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