Night and Hope

Arnošt Lustig was born in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald, Lustig began writing as a journalist in the late 1940s and as a novelist and short-story writer in the late 1950s. Much of his work centered on the Holocaust. Lustig left Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the 1968 Prague Spring, which he had supported, and found his way to the United States, where he taught at American University until 2003, when he returned to Prague. From 1995 to 1997 he was the editor in chief of the Czech edition of Playboy. His works were nominated for the Pulitzer and Man Booker prizes.