Zuzana Justman (born 20 June 1931) is a native of the former Czechoslovakia, which she left in 1948. A documentary filmmaker and writer, she now lives in New York, but she has filmed most of her documentaries in the country of her birth and other European countries.
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Her brother was Jiří Robert Pick (1925–1983), Czech writer and playwright. During World War II Zuzana Justman, her brother and her parents, Viktor and Marie Pick, were imprisoned for two years in the Terezín concentration camp. Viktor was deported to Auschwitz where he was killed, the others survived.
After the communist putsch ("Victorious February") of 1948, Zuzana and her mother left for Argentina. Jiri never fully recovered from the serious illnesses he contracted in Terezin, but he became a prolific writer who began to publish his work soon after the war and he remained in Prague. Detesting the Peron regime, Justman left Buenos Aires in 1950 to study at Vassar College.
She received a B.A. from Vassar and later a Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Columbia University.
She worked as a writer and translator and then in 1986 she began to make her first film Terezin Diary (completed in 1989), a documentary about the World War II concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia
In 1993 she wrote, produced and directed Czech Women: Now We Are Free.
Her documentary Voices of the Children, which tells the story of three concentration camp survivors, received the 1999 Emmy Award for best historical program, the Certificate of Merit at the Chicago International Film Festival, in 1998 the Gold Plaque at the Chicago International Television Competition, in 1998 Best Documentary and Audience Choice for Best Documentary awards at Film Fest New Haven, in 1997 the Silver Apple from National Educational Media Network.
Justman's film A Trial in Prague about a 1952 show trial in Communist Czechoslovakia (known as the Slansky Trial) opened theatrically in 2001 to positive reviews.
Her 2006 adaptation of her brother's 1982 play The Unlucky Man in the Yellow Cap (in original Czech Smolař ve žluté čepici ), was performed at the FringeNYC festival in August 2006.
She is married to Daniel Justman, a psychiatrist. She has two sons from a previous marriage to the late writer David Boroff, Philip and David, as well as two stepchildren, Alexander and Jessica Justman.