LOS ANGELES - At a tribute on the Universal Studios lot this week, "Schindler's List" producer Branko Lustig finally received his tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl commonly presented to boys before they are bar mitzvahed.
The 78-year-old Lustig will go through his coming-of-age ceremony early next month at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the place where he couldn't have had it when he was an adolescent imprisoned in World War II.
The ceremony 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 the nearby Birkenau death camp in what was occupied Poland during the war.
"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 at the tribute.
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.
Lustig's bar mitzvah will take place in front of the barracks "where I was when I was actually 12 years old," he said, adding, "It will be a great event for me -- and I hope it will be the last time that I'm going to Auschwitz."
LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
