Arnošt Lustig
Czech writer Arnošt Lustig (1926 -2012) is being honored by a documentary film exactly one year since his death.
Nine Lives will be released by Doc Alliance Films for Internet distribution Feb. 20. For six days the film will be available to watch for free at www.dafilms.com After Feb. 26 interested viewers will be able to purchase the film.
Lustig survived Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Dachau, died in Prague Sat. February 26 2012 after a five-year battle with lung cancer. A novelist, short story writer and playwright, Lustig was best known for his novel Lovely Green Eyes, translated by Ewald Osers, which was nominated for a Pultizer Prize in 2003. The novel tells the story of Hanka, a 15 year old Jewish girl who survives in a death camp by becoming a prostitute for her German captors. Reviewing the book for the Independent, Leslie Chamberlain wrote: “moral teaching is only one part of Lustig’s work, which sifts an almost unique moral poetry out of the Holocaust’s ashes.”
An early passage from the novel reads: “This is the story of my love. It is about love almost as much as it is about killing; about one of love’s many faces: killing. It is about No. 232 Ost, the army brothel that stood in the agricultural estate by the River San before the German army retreated further west; about 21 days, about what a girl of 15 endured; of what it means to have the choice of going on living or being killed, between choosing to go to the gas chamber or volunteering to work in a field brothel as an Aryan girl. It is about what memory or oblivion will or will not do.”
An earlier novel, A Prayer for Katerina Horowitzova, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974.
Lustig studied journalism at Charles University and worked for Radio Prague for a number of years. Between 1989 and 2003 he split his time between Prague and Washington, DC, where he was a teacher at American University. President Václav Havel gave Lustig an apartment at Prague Castle, and the writer was the recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize in 2008.
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