Arnost Lustig, a Czech-born fiction writer who drew on his experience as the survivor of three concentration camps to create unsentimental portrayals of life during the Holocaust, died Feb. 26 of cancer in Prague. He was 84.

Lustig, a retired professor of literature at American University, had written more than a dozen novels and short story collections since the late 1950s. He won acclaim for his finely rendered portraits of people who confront terrible choices — and manage to commit tiny acts of great heroism — during the most horrific of times.

His books included “Dita Saxova,” which traces the struggles of a woman tormented by her survival after so many have died at the hands of the Nazis; “A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova,” about a rebellion at the Auschwitz concentration camp; and “Night and Hope,” a collection of stories about the losses and small consolations of life inside a death camp.

He found creative inspiration in the details of his past: As a teenager, he had been imprisoned at Theresienstadt, a Nazi ghetto/concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. He was later taken to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.