Arnost Lustig, an acclaimed Czech author who drew on his own harrowing experiences as a teenager in World War II to produce novels and short stories laced with tales of young people who survive the Holocaust, died on Feb. 26 in Prague. He was 84.
The embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington confirmed his death.
As a 15-year-old Jew, Mr. Lustig was sent in 1942 to Theresienstadt, the Nazi “show ghetto” in what is now the Czech Republic. Later he was transported to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. In 1945 he escaped from a train carrying him to Dachau, when the engine was destroyed by an American fighter bomber.
One of Mr. Lustig’s short stories begins with two young men fleeing from a train and hiding in the woods. After stealing bread from a farm, they are caught by a local militia and are about to be executed when the militiamen simply laugh and walk away. That story was the basis for the Czech director Jan Nimec’s first full-length feature film, “Diamonds of the Night,” in 1964.
A series of Mr. Lustig’s works was published in the United States under the title “Children of the Holocaust.” Reviewing the series for The New York Times in 1979, Ernst Pawel said that the “heroes and victims are children,” adding, “Mr. Lustig attempts to show not only how these youngsters died or survived, but how some of them managed to live, even to retain their humanity.”
Perhaps Mr. Lustig’s best-known work is the novel “A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova,” published in the United States in 1973. It tells of a group of Jewish American businessmen trapped in Nazi Germany who try to bribe their way out of the country. They befriend a local Jewish girl, Katerina, and try to pay her way to freedom. The Nazis keep tricking them, and all are killed in the camps.
“A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova” was one of the more than 20 books written by Mr. Lustig, who in 2004 was awarded a literary prize by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Four years later he received the Franz Kafka Prize, an international literary award presented by the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague.
“In many people’s eyes, he was the greatest novelist of the Holocaust,” Charles R. Larson, a literature professor at American University in Washington, where Mr. Lustig taught for 31 years, said on Monday.
Arnost Lustig was born in Prague on Dec. 21, 1926. His father and many other members of his family were killed in the Holocaust; his mother and sister survived. After escaping from the transport train in 1945 and making his way through the woods, he returned to Prague and fought in the resistance movement.
After the war Mr. Lustig studied journalism at Charles University in Prague and later worked as a magazine editor, script writer and radio reporter. He covered the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. While in Israel he met his future wife, Vera Weislitzova, who later wrote a collection of poems, “Daughter of Olga and Leo,” about her family’s fate during the Holocaust. She died several years ago.
Mr. Lustig is survived by a son, Josef, and a daughter, Eva.
With his literary work gaining recognition starting in the late 1950s, Mr. Lustig became a prominent member of a restive group of writers and artists whose energies helped to foment the Prague Spring of 1968. He had a close friendship with Vaclav Havel, the playwright, leader of the dissidents and future president of a liberated Czechoslovakia.
The Lustigs were in Italy in August 1968, promoting the liberal policies of Czechoslovakia’s Communist leader, Alexander Dubcek, when Soviet forces invaded his country and crushed the reform movement. They decided not to return home, and in 1970 came to the United States, where Mr. Lustig became a visiting writer at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Three years later he accepted a professorship at American University.
After the fall of Communism in 1989, the Lustigs regularly returned to Prague, and in 1995 Mr. Lustig was named editor in chief of the Czech-language version of Playboy magazine. He held that post for two years, bringing essayists and fiction writers to its pages. The Lustigs moved back to Prague for good after Mr. Lustig retired from American University in 2004.
In 1995 a short story by Mr. Lustig was included in “Art From the Ashes,” a Holocaust anthology edited by Lawrence L. Langer. In that story he wrote of a concentration-camp inmate listening to the sounds of people being shot outside his barracks and knowing that falling snow was mingling with ashes from a crematorium.
“I felt the snow, the ashes and the silence around me,” he wrote. “I felt the urge to go outside, for which the guard would immediately shoot me before I got to the barbed wire. I wanted to touch with my lips a sliver of ash or snowflake.”