Arnošt Lustig

Arnošt Lustig (Prague, 1926 – Prague, 2011) was a Czech writer of Jewish origin whose work spans novels, short stories, plays and screenplays for film and television. Writing in Czech and English, he returned again and again to the Holocaust, an experience that shaped him from adolescence onward. He matters because he helped show how postwar Central European literature confronted the extermination of the Jews and the life that followed under communism.

During the Second World War, as a young Jew in Czechoslovakia, he was sent in 1942 to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In 1945 he escaped from a train bound for Dachau after the convoy was mistakenly destroyed by an American fighter-bomber. He got back to Prague in time to join the May 1945 uprising against the Germans. After the war he studied journalism at Charles University and worked for years at Radio Prague. He later reported from Israel during its War of Independence, where he met his future wife, then a volunteer with the Haganah.

His relationship with the communist regime was difficult. In 1967 he was among the sharpest critics of the system at the Fourth Writers' Congress, and after the Middle East war of that year he left the Communist Party in protest at the break in relations with Israel. He took part in the Czech New Wave of the 1960s and wrote screenplays for it. After the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring in 1968, he left with his family, first for Yugoslavia and Israel, and in 1970 for the United States, where he taught literature and film in Washington.

After communism fell he split his time between Prague and Washington, and he settled permanently in Prague after retiring in 2003. He received the Franz Kafka Prize in 2008 and was honoured for his contribution to Czech culture on his eightieth birthday. His legacy lies mainly in having turned memory of the Holocaust into fiction of wide reach, combining testimony, irony and moral inquiry.