Voices From the Holocaust

Arnost Lustig

ARNOST LUSTIG Amost Lustig's books and stories have been translated into more than twenty languages, including Polish, German, Japanese , Hindi, Yiddish, Esperanto, and French. His best known fiction deals with the Holocaust experience of children . He himself survived the Holocaust as a boy. Born in Prague, Lustig came to the United States after having a distinguished career in writing and cinema in Czechoslovakia. He was a lecturer in film and literature at universities in his home country as well as in Japan, Canada, Israel, and the United States. His novel A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova 11974) was nominated for the National Book Award, and the television adaptation of that work received nine international prizes. Additionally, he has garnered a number of awards for radio scripts and stories in Czechoslovakia , Australia, and the United States. Among his works are Dita Saxova 11962); his "Children of the Holocaust" series 11977), including Darkness Casts No Shadow; Night and Hope, and Diamonds in the Night; The Unloved 11985); and Indecent Dreams 11988). Lustig was a war correspondent during the Arab-Israeli conflict 11948-1949) and served as a correspondent for Czechoslovak Radio in Europe, Asia, and North America. He later taught at the University of Iowa's International Writers Program, then at Drake University, 2 Voices from the Holocaust and in 1973 he began a long teaching career at American University. HJC You said in one of your books that you simply want to kill as long as you will be killed. You say you want to drink justice, but you talk about the line between justice and revenge as being a very thin line, since everything around us teaches us to kill. I'm wondering whether in some way you are killing when you write. AL First, I must tell you that I never killed anyone and I'm very happy for that. I believe that I can be a writer only becauseInever killed and becauseIdon't intend to kill. Ihave a technique when I write that suggests and makes the reader come to his own conclusions-but I wish him to make a certain conclusion. So when I say that my philosophy of writingis eitherto be killed or to kill, Imean that Iwould like to make the reader feel that Ihate both, that Ihate to be killed and I hate to kill. I'm asking, "What should we do to change the world?" But I don't express this question explicitly because that wouldn't be writing. That would be a textbook of philosophy. HJC So many writers !like Camus, Sartre, or Fuentes) have said that, particularly since the end of the SecondWorld War, either you're on the side of the victims or you're on the side of the executioners. You have to choose one or the other. AL I cannot accept this choice, and this is what I am writing about. I am writing about the possibility of changing the human condition so that my children won't have that question put before them: to kill or not to kill. You know, sometimes everything makes you feel that you are very close to being an enigma. Let us say that you are a fish. You were hom to swim near the surface. But at once some unknown pressure you are not used to pushes you down almost flat to the very bottom of the sea, where there are dark waters, and you lose your orientation because you were used to other waters without pressure. Or you are a fish down there used to the dark waters and you come up and see something completely different. This is what happened to the Jews. They 4.134] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 04:04 GMT) ARNOST LUSTIG · 3 were fish swimming in completely different waters than those they were thrown into and asked to swim in. They couldn't swim, they couldn't orient themselves. I was in three camps, in the fortress in Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz-Birkenaui and I was extremely lucky that I survived. I know that everybody who survived lives only because someone else died. Many times Iwished to die, not to see what I saw. And I was not in the worst of conditions . I didn't have to kill anyone, to eat human flesh, to humiliate anyone. I think that there were many times when I was really mad, not completely responsible for myself but maybe, even then, lucky. HJC For instance? AL When...