Holocaust survivor and Oscar winner Branko Lustig, who won the Best Picture Oscars for Schindler’s List and Gladiator, has died at his home in Croatia. He was 87.
His death was announced on the website for Festival of Tolerance, which Lustig oversaw as president since 2008.
Lustig was born in Osijek, Yugoslavia, in 1932 to a Croatian Jewish family. He was a prisoner of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during World War II. Most of his family members were killed during the war, including his father and grandmother, who died in a gas chamber.
Lustig began work in the Yugoslavian film industry in the mid 1950s. He served as location manager for Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1971, as an assistant director on Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Tin Drum” and as a supervisor on Alan J. Pakula’s “Sophie’s Choice.”