Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci)

About the Author: Arnošt Lustig (1926–2011) was born in Prague into a comfortable middle-class Czech-Jewish family. In 1941 he was expelled from secondary school because he was a Jew. In 1942, his family was sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, from where in September 1944, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His father was gassed there. Arnošt, his mother, and sister survived. Lustig was taken to Buchenwald and then, in April 1945, he escaped from a train carrying him to the Dachau concentration camp. This experience inspired his short story Darkness Casts No Shadow in the book Diamonds of the Night. He returned to Prague in time to take part in the May Uprising against the Nazi occupation in 1945. After the war, Lustig became a member of the Communist Party. He studied at the School of Political and Social Sciences in Prague (completing his studies in 1950) and worked as a journalist in newspapers, magazines and at Radio Prague. He reported on the Arab-Israeli War from 1948 to 1949. From 1961 to 1968 Lustig was a scriptwriter for the state Barrandov Film Studio. In June 1967, Lustig and other Czech writers supported Israel in the Six-Day War against Egypt and Syria, and so they came into a conflict with Communist leadership which condemned Israel as an “aggressor”. Following the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968, he left Czechoslovakia, first to Israel, and later in 1970, to the United States where he taught, mostly in Washington D.C. at the American University, giving lectures on creative writing, film and literature. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he divided his time between Prague and the U. S. Apart from a few stories, the Holocaust was the subject of Lustig’s writing the whole time. His first works were among his best. They included the short stories Night and Hope, and Diamonds of the Night. Lustig’s stories often thematised the fate of beautiful Jewish girls or young women in prison camps (→ A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, The Unloved, Colette, Lovely Green Eyes etc.). It is typical for his later works that the author adapted and expanded his earlier texts, their original introspective and laconic character changing to a contemplative, verbose style.