She gave sugar cubes to prisoners returning to Terezín from other camps at the end of the war.
Download image
Zuzana Justman was born Zuzana Picková in Prague on 20 June 1931. During the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, the family gradually lost all their property, including the Pick Brothers factory, and their civil rights. The Pick family was to be deported to Terezín in 1943. Brother Robert Pick, later a satirist, fell ill with polio in Terezín. The Nazis took the witness’s father Viktor Pick to Auschwitz where, according to witnesses, he perished in a gas chamber immediately upon arrival. Zuzana, her mother, brother and grandmother survived the war in the Terezín ghetto and returned to their apartment in Karlín. In 1948, the family emigrated to South America with the help of an uncle, except for her brother who had joined the Communist Party. Zuzana finished high school in the US and then entered university. She settled in New York. She has made several documentaries on the Holocaust and has also worked on other socio-historical topics. She won a prestigious television Emmy Award in the USA for her documentary Voices of the Children based on interviews with the survivors of imprisonment in Terezín and Auschwitz. After November 1989, she was active in raising funds for restoring Jewish sights in Czechoslovakia. In 2024, Zuzana Justman was living in New York in an apartment overlooking Central Park.
