The film draws on Lustig’s own wartime experiences. As a Jewish teenager, he survived the Nazi concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald before escaping in 1945 from a transport carrying prisoners toward Dachau after the train was attacked by an Allied aircraft.

The evening will begin on September 15 at 6 pm, with a screening of Diamonds of the Night, followed by a special discussion with former Washington Post film critic Desson Thomson, who will reflect on the film, Lustig’s remarkable life and legacy, and his own friendship with the celebrated writer.

Event Details:

Date/Time: September 15, 6 pm (doors open at 5:45 pm)

Location: Embassy of the Czech Republic
3900 Spring of Freedom Street, NW, Washington, DC 20008

RSVP required to:  https://Lustig100.eventbrite.com/

ABOUT THE FILM
Directed by Jan Němec | 1964 | Czech and German with English subtitles | 67 min.

Diamonds of the Night follows two young Jewish men who escape from a train transporting them toward a concentration camp and flee into the forests of the Sudetenland. Exhausted, starving, and pursued, they struggle simply to stay alive. Rather than presenting their escape as a conventional wartime narrative, Němec places the viewer inside the young men’s increasingly desperate state of mind. Their journey through the forest is interwoven with memories, dreams, imagined possibilities, and hallucinations, blurring the boundaries between past and present, reality and imagination. Released in 1964, Diamonds of the Night was Němec’s first feature film and helped establish him as one of the most renowned directors of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

SPECIAL GUEST: DESSON THOMSON    
Desson Thomson is an American journalist and writer who served as a film critic for The Washington Post from 1987 to 2008. He later worked as a speechwriter for the U.S. Department of State during the Obama Administration from 2010 to 2017. Thomson was a friend of Arnošt Lustig and will share personal reflections on the writer, his extraordinary life, and the enduring importance of his work.

ARNOŠT LUSTIG     
Born in Prague in 1926, Arnošt Lustig was a celebrated Czech Jewish writer whose experiences during the Holocaust profoundly shaped his life and literary work. These experiences became central to Lustig’s writing. Through short stories and novels, he explored the lives of ordinary people confronted with extraordinary cruelty, often focusing on their struggle to preserve dignity, humanity, and hope under the most extreme circumstances. His best-known works include A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, Diamonds of the Night, The Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S., Darkness Casts No Shadow, Lovely Green Eyes, and Dita Saxova. Several of his works were adapted for film.

Following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia that ended the Prague Spring in 1968, Lustig spent time in Israel, eventually settling in Washington, DC, where he became a professor at American University. Following the fall of communism in 1989, he returned frequently to Prague and later moved back to the Czech Republic.

Lustig received numerous international honors for his literary achievements. He was twice awarded the National Jewish Book Award, received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994, and was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2009. In 2008, he received the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize.

Arnošt Lustig passed away on February 26, 2011, at the age of 84. His legacy continues through his writing and through the work of the Arnošt Lustig Foundation, established in Prague by his children, Eva and Josef Lustig. Lustig’s birth centenary and his lasting international contribution to literature and humanistic values have also received recognition from UNESCO, with the anniversary included among the significant anniversaries commemorated in 2026–2027.

ARNOŠT LUSTIG FOUNDATION    
Founded by Arnošt Lustig’s children, Eva and Josef Lustig, the Arnošt Lustig Foundation is an artistic and educational organization dedicated to preserving and sharing the writer’s work and legacy around the world. Through literature, art, education, and public programs, the Foundation seeks to advance the humanistic and democratic values that guided Lustig throughout his life and work and to ensure that his stories continue to speak to new generations.          

FestivAL100
To mark the centenary of Arnošt Lustig’s birth in 2026, the Foundation is presenting FestivAL100, an international, multidisciplinary program spanning 13 countries across four continents, including the United States. Celebrating humanity and the enduring relevance of Lustig’s legacy, FestivAL100 encourages audiences to reflect on human dignity, equality, justice, and individual responsibility while confronting intolerance, racism, fanaticism, sexism, and other forces that threaten a free and humane society.

Photo credit:
© Petra T. Růžičková,
Museum of Photography and Modern Pictorial Media in Jindřichův Hradec