Above the main gate at Auschwitz was a sign that read: “Work shall make you free.” In truth, only a few inmates who worked at the infamous death camp survived. Branko Lustig was one of them. Now he works as a movie producer and with the successful release of Schindler's List, his creative efforts may finally grant him freedom from his own past.
Lustig is the co-producer of Schindler's List – along with Steven Spielberg and Gerald R. Molen – and he recently delivered a lecture on the making of the film to students at the Department of Film, Ohio University. However, his talk was not a gossipy discussion about Hollywood. Instead, it was about his memories of the Holocaust.
“I was in a lot of camps,” said Lustig. “It was during my second time at Auschwitz that I got my number.”
He gestured toward his left forearm where he still carries the concentration camp tattoo that the Nazis branded inmates with.
At the time, he was ten years old. He was from a Jewish family in Croatia and was captured in 1942 after his parents made an unsuccessful bid for refuge in Hungary. For the next three years, Lustig lived as a slave laborer surrounded by the gas chambers and the crematories. For several months, he even worked on the construction of the gate at Auschwitz.
“That kind of experience is overwhelming. You forget lots of things. But when you think about it later, or when someone is telling you a story, you suddenly start to remember.”
Lustig is now in his early sixties and still has a youthful and vigorous appearance. He speaks in a soft voice with a slight accent and a precise tone that is obviously accustomed to describing the right visuals as the means to convey a complex set of emotions. That's what makes him a good producer and he has worked on more than 100 movies in both Hollywood and the former Yugoslavia. But he still has trouble finding the right words, images, and memories for his three years as a prisoner within the murder mills of the Final Solution.
“I worked for three or four months on the gate at Auschwitz, but I barely remembered it. Then, sometime back, I was in Tel Aviv when a man came up to me and said 'I remember you from Auschwitz. You were wearing black boots.' When he said that – boom – it all came back to me.”
The sensations return like a frightening flash in a dark room. It nearly obliterates everything else.
“I don't remember much about my family before the war,” Lustig calmly conceded. “I know that my father use to be the head waiter at a big hotel. The King of Yugoslavia use to play poker there.”
While filming Schindler's List, Spielberg asked Lustig if he had any photos of himself as a boy. Through his brother back in Croatia, Lustig was able to locate some. “I discovered that I was a pretty little boy dressed like an Austrian. That is what remains of my past before the war.”
But Lustig does have a vivid recollection of the day he almost died in 1944. He had been selected for the gas chambers and was already in line when he realized that he was standing next to a group of new prisoners who were just being processed into the camp. Thanks to his small size, he was able to hop into this other line without being noticed. He was still trapped in Auschwitz, but he got to stay alive that day.
However, by May of 1945, Lustig was finally close to death. Illness and starvation was devouring what was left of his weakened body. “My bed was near a window and I thought I was dead and going to heaven because I heard music unlike any I had ever heard before. The camp was being liberated by a Scottish brigade. They were marching in, playing their bagpipes.”
Lustig was 13 years old when he got his second chance at life. He eventually would study theatre at the University of Zagreb in Yugoslavia and became an actor. He got into movies as a combination actor and translator for a German-Yugoslavian co-production in Hungary and he became an assistant director at Jadran Films, Yugoslavia's main film and television studio. By the 1960s, he began working extensively with American producers who came to Yugoslavia to make movies about World War Two. In those days, the Yugoslavian army could be cheaply rented to stage pretend battles for the cameras.
Lustig earned his stripes as production manager with Fiddler on the Roof and Sophie's Choice and was the assistant director for The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. He even received an Emmy as producer of the mini-series Drug Wars: the Camarena Story. He had a promising career ahead of himself in television.
“But I wanted to make movies,” shrugged Lustig.
More to the point, he wanted to make a movie about Oskar Schindler. Lustig first heard about Schindler's story in the mid-1960s when MGM came to Yugoslavia to scout locations for a possible film version. The movie never got off the ground, but the tale stuck with Lustig for the next 20 years. When the book by Thomas Keneally appeared in 1982, Lustig began pursuing a film version. So was Steven Spielberg. Lustig needed someone who had the clout to get the film made; Spielberg needed someone who knew the subject.
“One day in 1985, the telephone rings and it's Steven Spielberg's office,” explained Lustig. “Steven wants to talk to me about the project. So I went to this meeting and Steven said 'I only have 10 minutes time for you'.” Lustig had already been involved in several previously unsuccessful efforts to launch a movie about Schindler and he wasn't interested in failing one more time. He proceeded to engage Spielberg in an enthusiastic 90 minute discussion about the movie.
“It was then that I knew that Spielberg would make a great film out of Schindler's List.”
And Lustig is still impressed with Spielberg. He is currently developing two other projects for Spielberg's company, Amblin Entertainment. Lustig has a script ready to go for The Last Days of Don Juan and is working on pre-production of The Legend of Zorro.
But the making of Schindler's List has brought one part of Lustig's life to a major conclusion, both personally and morally.
“When I was there, with people dying in front of me, everyone said 'Be my witness. Let the world know what happened to us'. And I think I survived in order to fulfill my obligations to them.”
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