Transport from Paradise – The Granddaughters
Film screening of “Transport from Paradise” followed by a discussion with Eva Lustigová and Jacqueline Gies, moderated by Aya Zarfati and Dr Wolfgang Schwarz
An award-winning film of the Czechoslovak New Film Wave “Transport from Paradise”, directed by Zbyněk Brynych in 1962 (Golden Sail Award, International Film festival Locarno) is based on the screenplay by author Arnošt Lustig and his first collection of short stories “Night and Hope. The story is set in 1944 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where the Nazis had a propaganda film made to deceive the outside world into believing that camp life was ‘normal’, with fulfilling work in crafts and gardening, as well as a rich cultural life. In reality, all prisoners were subsequently deported to Auschwitz extermination camp or other final destinations – a fact to which the film’s title alludes with bitter irony.
In the second part of the event entitled “Enkelinnen”, Eva Lustigová – daughter of Arnošt Lustig, whose grandfathers were murdered in Auschwitz and Dachau – and Jacqueline Gies – granddaughter of Robert Gies, the SS-Standartenführer and personal secretary to Karl Hermann Frank, a key figure in Nazi terror in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia – will reflect about the meaning of humanity and justice in the context of their own lives and today´s world. Jacqueline Gies and Eva Lustigová met less than a year ago. As granddaughters of perpetrator and victim they are joined in their vision of a world of greater justice over eighty years later. They carry different burdens that have shaped their lives.
Programme:
Greeting
S.E. Jiří Čistecký, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the Federal Republic of Germany
Introduction
Dr Jakob Müller, House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site
Film screening: Transport z ráje | Transport from Paradise
Directed by Zbyněk Brynych, ČSSR 1962, running time: 93 minutes, original version with German subtitles
Event break
Granddaughters – Eva Lustigová and Jacqueline Gies: An unexpected pairing of women joined together in their vision of a world of greater justice in a conversation about the film and the meaning of humanity and justice in the context of their own lives and the present day.
Moderators: Aya Zarfati (House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site) and Dr Wolfgang Schwarz (Cultural officer for the Bohemian Lands at the Adalbert Stifter Association, Munich)
Duration: 11am to 2:30pm, admission from 10:30am.
A collaboration between the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site, the Arnošt Lustig Foundation, Prague, the Czech Embassy in Berlin, the Czech Centre Berlin, the German Cultural Forum for Central and Eastern Europe and the Cultural Office for the Bohemian Lands at the Adalbert Stifter Association as part of ‘FestivAL100’ to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Arnošt Lustig’s birth
With the aim of celebrating humanity, FestivAL100 is held on the occasion of the centenary of Arnošt Lustig´s birth in 2026 (www.lustigfoundation.org). The author´s global impact is recognized by UNESCO as reflected on the prestigious UNESCO list of celebrated anniversaries commemorated in 2026-2027.
The programme seeks to inspire participants in thirteen countries across four continents to champion equality and justice, confronting social ills like racism, fanaticism, and sexism to build a fairer, more humane society.
FestivAL100 is under the patronage of the President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, the National Committee of UNESCO for the Czech Republic, the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic, the Ambassador of the Czech Republic in Germany, Jiří Čistecký, and other distinguised institutions.
ARNOŠT LUSTIG (1926–2011), Czech writer, journalist, screenwriter and educator, born in Prague. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages. Arnošt Lustig has been nominated for the most prestigious literary awards: the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the International Booker Prize. As a Holocaust survivor, he has devoted much of his work to the theme of the Shoah. He was sentenced to death three times by the Nazis and to a prison term by the Czechoslovak communists. For over twenty years, he was on the list of banned authors in his home country and lived in exile. In August 2020, his children, Eva and Josef, established the Arnošt Lustig Foundation to promote the humanist and democratic values that Arnošt Lustig embodied through his life and work.
