Tonight, the 98th Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, will take place. Unfortunately, many award shows have increasingly become platforms for politics rather than celebrations of the arts, and I fear the Oscars may be no exception.
Yet I want to take a moment to look back at the life of a man who won two Oscars—someone whose name few will recognize, but whose story is unforgettable..
Branko Lustig (10 June 1932 – 14 November 2019) was a Croatian film producer best known for winning the Academy Award for Best Picture for Schindler’s List and Gladiator. He is the only person born in the territory of present-day Croatia to have won two Academy Awards.
Lustig was born in Osijek, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, to a Croatian Jewish family. His father, Mirko, worked as the head waiter at Café Central in Osijek, while his mother, Vilma (née Gütter), was a housewife. Unlike his parents, Lustig’s grandparents were religious, and he regularly attended the local synagogue with them.
During World War II, Lustig was imprisoned as a child for two years in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Most members of his family perished in death camps across Europe, including his grandmother, who was murdered in a gas chamber. His father was killed in Čakovec on 15 March 1945. Lustig’s mother survived the Holocaust and was reunited with him after the war.
On the day the camps were liberated, Lustig weighed only 66 pounds (approximately 30 kg). He later credited his survival in Auschwitz to a German officer who happened to come from the same suburb of Osijek as Lustig. The officer heard him crying and asked about his father; upon learning his name, he realized he had known him.
By the end of 1941, approximately two-thirds of Croatia’s Jewish population had been sent to Ustaša concentration camps, where most were murdered upon arrival. Between August 1942 and May 1943, the remaining Croatian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. In total, about 30,000 of Croatia’s 37,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
Branko Lustig received his first Oscar in 1993 for producing the film Schindler’s List, which was based on the novel Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally. The story recounts the actions of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved hundreds of Jews during World War II. Lustig also made a cameo appearance early in the film as a nightclub maître d’.
In July 2015, Lustig presented his Oscar to Yad Vashem for permanent safekeeping. He won his second Academy Award in 2001 for producing the epic historical film Gladiator, which depicts a struggle for power in Imperial Rome.
He celebrated his bar mitzvah on 2 May 2011 at Auschwitz concentration camp, in front of Barrack No. 24a. He had missed this traditional rite of passage at age 13 because he was imprisoned in the same barrack after being deported from Osijek when he was ten years old.
The ceremony took place during a March of the Living educational tour of Poland and Israel for high school students.
sources
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0527322/?ref_=nmbio_ov_bk
https://www.yadvashem.org/press-release/14-november-2019-15-50.html
https://sfi.usc.edu/about/staff/branko-lustig
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branko_Lustig
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