Arnost Lustig was born on December 21, 1926 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. After he had completed seven years of schooling, the Nazis prohibited the education of Jewish children, and he became an apprentice tailor and leather-worker. In 1942, he was sent with his parents to Theresienstadt concentration camp where he dug tracks for railroads and air-raid shelters for a German hospital. Two years later, he was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau (where his father died in the gas chambers), then to Buchenwald. "Nine out of ten survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau gain safe distance from it during the day, but at night when the will is suspended they inevitably return to it.... Auschwitz-Birkenau ... [is] with them. In them."¹

In the spring of 1945, Lustig escaped from the train carrying him to his death in Dachau when an American plane dive-bombed the engine, mistaking the train for a military transport. Lustig returned to Prague and participated in the...