- About NIU
- Academics
- Admissions
- Alumni Association
- Campus Life
- Employment
- Giving To NIU
- Huskie Athletics
- News & Events
- Outreach &
Community Resources - Regional Sites
- Research
- Visit NIU
Subscribe to NIU News
| E-Mail
News Release
Contact: Tom Parisi, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-3635
October 7, 2003
Renowned writer on the Holocaust to lecture at NIU
DeKalb, Ill.--Writer Arnost Lustig--a Holocaust survivor, former Czechoslovakian resistance fighter and documentary film star--will lecture at NIU at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14 in Room 30 of Douglas Hall (lower level, C/D wing). The free lecture is open to the public.
The University Honors Program is sponsoring the event, titled "An Evening with Arnost Lustig." The Holocaust is the central theme in each of the author's 13 books of fiction, which have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Lustig's major works include "Night and Hope," "Indecent Dreams," "Street of Lost Brothers" and "Lovely Green Eyes." Set in Central Europe between the years 1939 and 1947, his stories probe the humanity of the dehumanized, the courage of the terrorized, the friendship of the abandoned, and the possibilities of moral triumph in the face of fear and humiliation.
"Arnost Lustig is among the most preeminent writers on the Holocaust," says Steve Franklin, Honors House faculty coordinator. Franklin teaches an honors seminar on Holocaust literature.
"In the wide variety of his fictional techniques--his plots, characters, settings, conflicts and points of view--and in the sheer eloquence of his writing, Arnost captures the enormity of the Holocaust on human consciousness," Franklin says. "He reveals to his readers the profound truth of an almost unimaginable world--a world we cannot forget and which we ignore at our peril."
Several of Lustig's novels and short stories were made into celebrated European films, including "Night and Hope," "Darkness Casts No Shadow" and "Dita Saxova." During the 1950s and 1960s, as a founder of what was to become known as the "Czech New Wave Cinema," Lustig influenced such famous Czech writers and filmmakers as Milan Kundera and Milos Forman.
During his lecture at NIU, Lustig will talk about the documentary film, "Fighter." The film follows the lives of Lustig and his friend, Jan Wiener. Both in their seventies now and living in America, the two men retrace Wiener's escape from Prague after the Nazi takeover in the 1930s.
No less than Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert praises the film. "What unfolds onscreen is remarkable: The passions and arguments of the past are resurrected in the present."
Lustig is a professor of film and literature at American University in Washington, D.C. During his youth, he once escaped a transport headed for the Dachau death camp. He spent much of his adolescence in Nazi concentration camps. Together with many other members of the Prague Jewish community, he and his parents were sent to a Czechoslovakian ghetto and then to Auschwitz, where his father was killed. American troops liberated Lustig from the Buchenwald concentration camp in April of 1945.
Lustig returned to his homeland and spent the next 20 years in Prague. There, as a writer and screenwriter, he began to create the stories and novels that form the basis of his reputation today.
For more information on the lecture, contact Steve Franklin at (815) 753-6641.
-30-