Auschwitz survivor and 'Schindler's List' producer going back there for his bar mitzvah

At a tribute on the Universal Studios lot Monday evening, "Schindler's List" producer Branko Lustig finally received his tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl commonly presented to boys before they're bar mitzvahed.

The 78-year-old Lustig will go through his coming-of-age ceremony early next month at the place where he couldn't have had it when he was an adolescent: the Auschwitz concentration camp. | Related story: Encino nonprofit aspires to end suffering

Lustig's long-delayed bar mitzvah will be held as part of this year's March of the Living, the international event that unites thousands of teens with Holocaust survivors for a learning trek from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the notorious death camps the Nazis operated in occupied Poland during World War II.

"Because I was still a child, the adult inmates in the camp pleaded with me to tell the story of what had happened to the Jewish people," Lustig said Monday, in a Universal screening room before some three dozen friends, colleagues and admirers.

He would get the chance to tell that story decades later with "Schindler's List," the 1993 best-picture winner that

portrayed industrialist Oskar Schindler's efforts to save the lives of his Jewish workers during the Holocaust.

Steven Spielberg, who directed "Schindler's List," offered a videotaped message of congratulations for Lustig at Monday's tribute: "I know you never had a bar mitzvah. That experience was taken from you by the war, by the Holocaust. So this must be such an emotional experience for you. It's an emotional experience for me just thinking about you and what you're experiencing."

Born in Croatia, which sided with the Axis after the Germans invaded the fractious Yugoslavia confederation in the spring of 1941, Branko and his family avoided capture for a year and a half. He was ultimately transported to Auschwitz in November 1942. A strong boy, he was put to work in mines and construction, but like most survivors of the genocide he attributes living through the ordeal to "mostly luck."

When he was finally liberated from the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany in April of 1945, Lustig weighed 66 pounds.

For years David Machlis, vice chairman of the non-profit International March of the Living, thought Lustig would be a perfect participant for the event, which has been bringing pilgrims and survivors to the Auschwitz memorial since 1988.

"Survivors are getting older, and it's important to develop a cadre of young adults that will be educated on the history and able to be the witnesses to the witnesses," New York-based Machlis, a college economics professor, said of the organization's mission. "In my opinion, this was a no-brainer. Producer of `Schindler's List,' survivor of Auschwitz - Branko Lustig has done more for Holocaust education than almost anyone in the universe."

Lustig said he had returned to the sites of the camps twice since the war, when he made "Schindler's List" and "War and Remembrance." A friend suggested that if he was going to return for the march, he should finally have his bar mitzvah.

"I said `OK, we'll do it,"' Lustig recalled in an interview last week. "But on the condition that we make it in front of the same barrack where I was when I was actually 12 years old.'

"They agreed," Lustig added. "It will remind me of an incredible time that, today, I don't believe that I went through. It will be a great event for me- and I hope it will be the last time that I'm going to Auschwitz."

Among local teens participating in the March of the Living on May 2 will be Calabasas High School student Naytal Orevi.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, to get to understand just how history went down," said Orevi, who also plans to celebrate her 18th birthday in Israel the week following the march, when the group moves on to the Jewish state for its Independence Day commemoration.

"We can only understand so much from stories," Orevi explained. "I can really get into somebody's head who was in the Holocaust and go with them to where they suffered on this trip. If they're strong enough to do that, then that would be an honor for me to just listen to them, and I know that I'm going to be one of the last generations that will be able to do that."

Machlis expects some 10,000 people from all over the world - at least a quarter of them non-Jewish - to participate in this year's march.

"The main purpose is to make the world a better place in which to live, to combat hatred and intolerance, so that `never again' maybe has a meaning," Machlis said.

After the war, Lustig returned to Yugoslavia and started the film producing career that eventually led him to Hollywood. He agrees that there can never be enough witnessing and education regarding the Holocaust.

"Keeping the story about Auschwitz alive is very important," Lustig said. "I am now one of the last survivors, and I have a feeling that when we go, it will be very difficult for young people to remember what happened there. It's already difficult in some European countries to talk about the Holocaust. People don't believe, or don't want to believe, and they don't want to face the fact that so many people were killed for no reason."

One thing Lustig isn't too concerned about, though, is what causes many Jewish youths to lose sleep: Learning all of that Hebrew he's supposed to recite at the bar mitzvah ceremony.

"Y'know, I am not learning because I can't learn, anymore, to say everything," Lustig said with a brief chuckle. "But I will repeat after the rabbi. I am very fortunate that Rabbi Lau, the head rabbi in Jerusalem, will come to Auschwitz and he will make my bar mitzvah. That makes me very happy."

And in case you were wondering: No, there won't be a bar mitzvah party after the pre-March ceremony at Auschwitz. Lustig's bar mitzvah on the site where more than a million were murdered will, of course, be a celebration of enormous import in and of itself.

"To my knowledge, no one else has had a bar mitzvah at Auschwitz," Machlis said. "There's tremendous significance. We came back. We survived. We're here to make a difference, to make the world better based on the most horrific act of humanity. It's a statement of survival, a statement of renewal, a statement that we have to make the future much better than the past."

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