Arno Lustiger (1924–2012)

Arno Lustiger was born to a Jewish family in Będzin, Upper Silesia (present-day Poland). His parents were Gitla and David Lustiger, a city councilor and businessman, and he had four siblings. His father's bakery machine shop was confiscated by the Nazis in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. In 1943, the Jewish population of Będzin was confined to a ghetto. In August 1943, the ghetto was emptied and the Jews were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. A few days later, the Lustiger family voluntarily went to a forced labor camp in Annaberg, Silesia, with the hope of staying together, but they were torn apart. Lustiger was sent to the concentration camp at Ottmuth and five other concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His father and brother were murdered. In April 1945, Lustiger escaped a death march away from the advancing U.S. military and was rescued by the American soldiers. The U.S. Army hired him as a translator. After the war ended, he was reunited with his mother and three sisters at a displaced persons camp near Frankfurt. His plans to go to America fell through due to the ill health of his mother and sister, and he wound up staying in Frankfurt, where he helped build the postwar Jewish community as well as a successful women's apparel business. Forty years passed before he felt able to write about the Holocaust. He sold the business in the 1980s and became an historian and author. He wrote articles and books about German Jewish history, the Spanish Civil War, the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union by Josef Stalin, and ground-breaking work on Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Zum Kampf auf Leben und Tod! Das Buch vom Widerstand der Juden, 1933–1945 (To Fight for Life and Death! The Book of Jewish Resistance, 1933-1945) was published in 1994 to international acclaim. From 2004 to 2006, he was a visiting professor at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt.