Producer felt obligation after hearing ‘tell our story’ plea by Holocaust victims

B‘I hope I fulfilled my obligation to the innocent victims of the Holocaust.’’ Branko Lustig accepts the best picture Oscar for Schindler’s List

ranko Lustig was just a boy, newly arrived at Auschwitz, when he witnessed a scene that would be seared into his memory. Seven prisoners at the Nazi death camp were to be hanged in a public execution, and Lustig found himself in the front row before the gallows.

‘‘Moments before they were hanged, before the bench was kicked out from them, they all said as one: ‘Remember how we died,’ ’’ he recounted years later. ‘‘Tell the story about us,’’ they implored.

Lustig, who has died aged 87, was 12 years old and suffering from typhoid when he was liberated from

another Nazi camp, BergenBelsen, in 1945.

He returned to

his native

Croatia and, in

time, embarked on a film career that would take him to movie sets across Europe and to Hollywood, where in 1994 he shared the Academy Award for best picture as a producer of director Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List.

‘‘It’s a long way from Auschwitz to this stage,’’ Lustig said at the awards ceremony, adding, ‘‘I hope I fulfilled my obligation to the innocent victims of the Holocaust.’’

Lustig received a second Oscar as a producer of Gladiator (2000), the Ridley Scott epic of Ancient Rome starring Russell Crowe.

Lustig had a fruitful association with Scott, the English film-maker with whom he produced films including Black Hawk Down

(2001), based on a disastrous US military operation in Somalia in 1993, and American Gangster (2007), starring Crowe as the New York City police officer who pursues Frank Lucas, the drug kingpin played by Denzel Washington.

But he was best known for his work on Schindler’s List and other films that have been widely credited with helping to preserve the memory of that time, as it recedes ever farther into the past.

Among Lustig’s first American films was Sophie’s Choice, a 1982 adaptation of William Styron’s novel about a Polish woman who is sent to Auschwitz and forced to choose which of her two children will be murdered. Meryl Streep played the title character and received the Oscar for best actress for the film, with Lustig as production supervisor.

Later that decade, he was an associate producer of two TV series, based on Herman Wouk’s epic World War II novels, the 18-hour Winds of War and 30-hour War and Remembrance.

War and Remembrance, which cost a reported $110 million, was the first occasion when officials in Poland, where Auschwitz is located, allowed movie-makers to film at the camp for a major commercial project. The series featured actors including Robert Mitchum, Jane Seymour and John Gielgud – as well as nearly 4500 extras.

Many of them, while soldiering through the frigid Polish winter, participated in recreations of horrors that had taken place in the teeming camp. Some had their hair shorn and were stripped of their clothing.

‘‘When we were first planning to shoot here, I was thinking, ‘How can we do this, how can we make a picture here on this sacred land?’ ‘‘ Lustig told the New York Times. ‘‘But now that we are here it is terribly important that we make this picture here because people are forgetting what happened.’’

He added that he tried in the course of his work to ‘‘cling to being a professional, like the others’’, but that ‘‘once in [a] while, when we film children, I break down. When I was 12 I was here and my duties were to open the bar underneath the gate that said ‘Arbeit macht frei’ ’’ – work will make you free – ‘‘when officers arrived.’’

Lustig met Spielberg in Los Angeles and they formed an immediate connection. Lustig told the Hollywood Reporter that when he recounted to Spielberg, who is Jewish, his experience in the camps, the director kissed the number tattooed on Lustig’s arm and declared, ‘‘You will be my producer.’’

‘‘He is the man who gave me the possibility to fulfil my obligation,’’ Lustig said of Spielberg.

Schindler’s List, based on a book by Thomas Keneally, starred Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who was credited with saving more than 1200 Jews during the Holocaust by giving them jobs in his factory. Lustig had a cameo as a maitre d’ at a Nazi nightclub.

Lustig was born in 1932, in the city of Osijek, located in what then was Yugoslavia and today is Croatia. He was interned in labour camps before being sent to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. When British troops arrived on April 15, 1945, to liberate BergenBelsen, the camp in Germany where he had been transferred, he heard the sound of bagpipes and concluded he was dead. ‘‘I’m in heaven finally,’’ he recalled thinking, ‘‘and these are angels playing.’’

He and his mother were among the only family members to survive the Holocaust.

Lustig studied at the theatrical academy in Zagreb before making his first foray into movies as a film translator. Other Ridley Scott collaborations included Hannibal (the 2001 sequel to The Silence of the Lambs), Kingdom of Heaven (a 2005 epic set during the Crusades) and A Good Year (a 2006 romantic comedy).

Lustig and his wife, Mirjana, had a daughter. He said he was acutely aware that as survivors died, only books and films would remain to tell the story of the Holocaust.

‘‘Maybe the reason I survived the camps was to help make movies about them,to show people what happened.’’