Arnost Lustig

Arnost Lustig was born in Prague in 1926. He had completed 7 grades when the Nazis prohibited all Jewish children from attending school.

In 1942, he was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Two years later, he was transferred to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald.

In the spring of 1945, he escaped a train carrying him to his death in Dachau, when an American fighter-bomber dive-bombed the engine thinking it a military transport.

He managed to get back to Prague and took part in the anti-Nazi uprising in May 1945. After the war, Lustig studied journalism at Charles University and worked for Radio Prague.

His mother and sister survived the Holocaust but the rest of his family were killed along with six million others. He covered the Arab-Israeli Wai in 1948 in Israel while he met and married his wife, Vera Weislitzova, who wrote the poetry collection, "Daughter of Olga and Leo," about her family's fate during the Holocaust.

Lustig left Prague during the Soviet occupation in 1968.

He and his family came to the United States in 1970 after the Soviets invaded Czech. He became a visiting writer at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1973, he became a professor at American University in Washington D.C.

(1996-) A teacher at American University in Washington D.C.

He returned to Prague after retired from American University in 2004. He had a close friendship with Vaclav Havel.