Schindler's List

K.D. Absolutely

Rating: really liked it
Much has been said about the 1993 Stephen Spielberg Oscar-winning movie. In 2007, it ranked 8th in the 100 Best American Movies For All Times list. I saw it twice in the movie house when it was released. I bought copies of it. Copies... because you know how technology progresses: VHS, then VCD, then DVD, then Blue Ray. (when will this ever stop?) Every time I bought me a copy, I watched it. Every time I watched it, I cried.

But surprisingly, I did not cry reading the book, 1982 Thomas Keanally’s (born 1935) Booker Prize winning Schindler’s List. Rather, I was enthralled by it. Do you know the feeling when you're eyes are wide awake and your brain is busy trying to absorb what you are reading especially facts and figures? You do not have time to cry. It is normally “the book is better than the movie” for me. Not this time. The book made me understand the movie more. So, saying that the movie is better than the book is an injustice to the book. After all, the movie was based on that and Spielberg was so faithful to it, you will easily recall the scene in the movie while reading the book. Spielberg tried to tell us a story by showing glorious black-and-white moving pictures on the screen. Keneally tells us the background of each mostly harrowing scene and each of the many unforgettable characters: their stories, their background, and their fates. Spielberg was constrained by the length of his reel(s) of film, i.e., production cost. Keneally did not have any limit on how many pages his novel would take. He has a rich source of information: Poldek Pfefferberg (1913-2001), one of the 1,100 Holocaust survivors saved by Schindler, called Schindlerjuden and who has made his life’s mission to tell the story of his savior, Oscar Schindler (1908-1974).

As in any of Holocaust novels, my heart bleeds most when it comes to the innocent children caught in the midst of it all. Who would forget the 8-y/o Olek Dresden who hides in the man’s toilet hole? Olek is the son of Henry Dresden who is the guy playing the piano in one of the scenes inside the house of Herr Kommander Amon Goethe, the heartless camp commander.

In the book, it is not Olek who hides in this disgusting hole. It is an unnamed 11-y/o boy and the book’s description, the scent is revolting and flies swarming the boy’s eyes, ears and mouth. This is one of the many information that you don’t get from watching the movie.

Who could forget the red little girl? Red dress. Red hat. Tiny red boots. This 3-y/o girl innocently roaming around inside the ghetto while executions are happening left and right while horse-riding Oscar and his girlfriend are watching from atop of the hill?

She survived the Holocaust and when she saw the movie, she identified herself to the press. She is Genia Dresner cousin to another character, Danka Dresner the 14-y/o bespectacled girl who also survived the holocaust together with her mother, Chaja Dresner and father, Juda Dresner. It’s just that I cannot find a copy of Danka’s picture to remind you of her. I also failed to find Lisiek’s. Lisiek is that 8-y/o boy who Amon shoots while traversing the field inside the concentration camp because he fails to clean the stain in Amon’s bathtub.

If I keep on giving you what I learned from this book, I will have a very long review. I also find enjoyed the last parts of the book giving the information on what happened to Oscar and Emily Schindler (his legal wife) after the war very interesting. Of course, you should know that Oscar Schindler is not a saintly person and so the moral is that even how bad some people seem to be, there is something good in them. Sometimes, God provides the opportunity for us to do good things to others.

When He come knocking, harden not your hearts. You may not have a tree in the Avenue of Righteous people but it always pays to be a good person.

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
Schindler's Ark = Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally

Schindler's Ark (Schindler's List) is a Booker Prize-winning historical fiction novel published in 1982 by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, which was later adapted into the highly successful movie Schindler's List directed by Steven Spielberg.

The United States version of the book was called Schindler's List from the beginning; it was later re-issued in Commonwealth countries under that name as well. The novel was also awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 1983.

This novel tells the story of Oskar Schindler, self-made entrepreneur and bon viveur who almost by default found himself saving Polish Jews from the Nazi death machine.

Based on numerous eyewitness accounts, Keneally's story is unbearably moving but never melodramatic, a testament to the almost unimaginable horrors of Hitler's attempts to make Europe judenfrei (free of Jews).

What distinguishes Schindler in Keneally's version is not, superficially, kindness or idealism, but a certain gusto. He was a flawed hero; he was not "without sin". He was a drinker, a womaniser and, at first, a profiteer.

After the war, he was commemorated as Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, but was never seen as a conventionally virtuous character.

The story is not only Schindler's, it is the story of Kraków's Ghetto and the forced labor camp outside town, Płaszów. It is the story of Amon Göth, Płaszów's commandant.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز نهم ماه ژوئن سال 2009میلادی

عنوان: فهرست شیندلر؛ اثر: تامس کنیلی؛ مترجم: الگا کیایی؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، نشر سمن، 1379، در 312ص، شابک 9646298141؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان استرالیا - سده 20م

اسکار شیندلر، تاجری معمولی، و از اعضای «حزب نازی» بوده، او برای طبع خوشگذران خویش، و با توجه به دوستی، بین او و مقامات رده بالای ارتش «نازی»، که بیشتر برای دست و دلبازیش بوده، «شیندلر» کارخانه‌ ای را، پنهان از نگاه دیگران با پول «یهودیانی» که، با آنان شریک شده، میخرد؛ سپس با توجه به همین روابط خود با ارتش، «یهودیان» را، به عنوان کارگر، در کارخانه ی خویش، به کار می‌گیرد؛ رفته رفته همین، راه فراری، برای گروهی از یهودیانی فراهم می‌شود، که در قرنطینه مانده‌ اند، و خطر مرگ هر لحظه آنان را تهدید می‌کند؛ ...؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 17/09/1398هجری خورشیدی؛ 17/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Fabian

Rating: really liked it
I was sort of familiar with the Schindler legacy--probably seen the film 5 or 6 times. (Isn't it peculiar that although it is regarded as one of the best biographies/films of all time it hardly ever makes it on any person's personal favorites lists? Blame the subject matter entirely.) So this is basically a reading that concentrates most of its attention on all the details that Steven Spielberg failed to bring to the screen. Because that inevitably occurs with all adaptations.

Well, this is almost an encyclopedia! The astonishing amount of research that went into this project boggles the mind: it is a full lifetime. I'm plagued with an image of a skeleton being dressed up with flesh and meat... like giving a body of fleshy substance to a ghost.

What I didn't know about Oskar Schindler & the Schindler jews:

1)Schindler's adolescence was unique (son of rich Roman Catholics) & charming (he was a fan of motorbike racing)
2)the original proposal: all Jews were going to be relocated far far away--to Madagascar!
3)some Jews approved of the ghetto at first since they thought that they would be free to worship and carry out their affairs with the enemies outside of the walls.
4)if you were OD & failed to deliver a family to the SS, then yours would be forfeit (thus, the motivation for Jews to turn against each other)
5)there were other Schindler-like saviors, millionaires who gave up everything to save lives, though their stories are told ELSEWHERE.
6)the book gives more in-depth biographies of the survivors, like those of Poldek Pfefferberg and Amon's maid, Helen Hirsch.
7)RESISTANCE- hinted at in the film; here, it is noted that something very similar to what occurs in Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds" occurred in real life-- rebels did destroy the only SS-only cinema!
8)the little girl in the red coat. For the film it is an emblem of hope, a very visual reminder. The book tells us that her name was Genia & it is because Schindler sees her from the hilltop, sees the determination in her and that invisible string that carries her to safety after the Aktion of the ghetto, that he gives up his life to the cause. Why does she survive? She's immune, like a Virgil that can accompany us down into the underworld unscathed. Because no one shields her from the horror of the massacre, because nobody cares for censorship or human dignity, because she is ALONE... it is that Schindler becomes Schindler.

& lastly, I would add that the book is somewhat more digestible than the movie. It still allows for the throat to constrict and for shivers to cover the entire body. I cannot pick one over the other since they both masterfully voice and embody the testament this great man left behind.

Dem

Rating: really liked it
He who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List.
Oscar Schindler was a German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

I had to wonder on completing this book just how many lives Oscar Schindler has really saved when you multiply to the present day. What a wonderful legacy and how relevant this book was with what is happening in the world today even small actions in being accountable and doing the right thing may save so many lives.

I watched the movie many years ago and remember being so affected by it. And when this book came up as a book club online I really wanted to Join in as as I felt it was important to read this and discuss it.

The more orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan - 'An hour of life is still life'.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

Thomas Keneally really brings history to life and you finish this book with restored faith in humanity.

A terrific read and a book that if on your TBR list then now is the time to bump it up as this one deserves to be read.

Manny

Rating: really liked it
Certain people (you know who you are) were suggesting the other day that no one actually reads Thomas Keneally. Well, I notice surprisingly few reviews here, so maybe the accusation has some substance. At any rate, I did read the book, and really liked it.

Quite apart from anything else, it's an inspiring true story, which the author tells well. But the thing I've thought about most is what it says about the nature of good and evil. At the beginning of the story, Schindler is by no stretch of the imagination a good guy. He's an up-and-coming entrepreneur in the Third Reich, with a clutch of complicated business interests and an appetising collection of mistresses. He sees an opportunity. Jews in Poland have been expropriated and deprived of most of their rights. They will work for next to nothing to get enough food to keep from starving. Many of these people are highly skilled. The potential is obvious. He'd better get hold of this one before his rivals do! So he sets up a factory, and starts operating at a staggering profit margin. The fact that he's away from his wife is only good news for his romantic life - icing on the cake.

Everything is going wonderfully, when the Nazis start deporting his workforce to the concentration camps. Nazi ideology holds that they're vermin, who are worth no more than the gold fillings, soap and hair that can be extracted from their dead bodies. But Schindler knows this isn't true. Alive, they can carry on making money for him. Dead, they're worthless. Like a good businessman, he starts bending rules to keep them in his factory, and out of the gas chambers.

Somehow, by imperceptible degrees, this Nazi shark becomes a saint who ends up saving the lives of over a thousand people, at great risk to his own. Keneally traces what happens in an unsentimental, matter-of-fact way. Each individual step is completely logical: there is no blinding relevation on the road to Damascus. But how can you explain the overall transformation? Was Schindler pushed by Adam Smith's invisible hand? Is it an example of the principle George Orwell enunciates, that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four, and that everything else just follows from that? Or was God, as He so often does, moving in mysterious ways?

Perhaps all three explanations are just different ways of saying the same thing. I'm sure I don't know. But if you haven't read the book, and you're interested in these questions, you might want to check it out some time.

Shirley Revill

Rating: really liked it
I read this book some time ago and I also watched the movie. I am not ashamed to say that this book and the film made me cry. Such a terrible time in our history when so much suffering was caused to so many. Thank God for people such as this who risked there own lives to save others.

Beverly

Rating: really liked it
I read this after the wonderful movie came out in 1993.

Maciek

Rating: really liked it
"The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins lies the gulf."

The story behind the book which brought the story of Oskar Schindler to the world is almost as interesting as the story of Schindler himself. In October 1980, Thomas Keneally - already an established and successful Australian author - found himself looking for a new briefcase at the end of his book tour in southern California, the last stop before returning home to Sydney. Fate led him to a luggage store owned by Leopold Pfefferberg, who recognized Keneally; because Keneally's credit card took 20 minutes to process the payment, he began telling him the story of Oskar Schindler - a German industrialist who has saved him and hundreds of others Polish Jews from certain destruction during World War 2, at an enormous personal cost and with incredible ingenuity.

Pfefferberg led Keneally to the back of his store, where he kept many documents he managed to save regarding Schindler and his life during the war - photographs, letters and office documents, including the famed list of workers at a Schindler factory in Brinnlitz, on which he pointed his own name. He would show these documents to anyone who would be interested, hoping to immortalize Schindler and his great deed for future generations; a movie was supposed to be made while he was still alive, but ultimately nothing came of it. Now, six years after Schindler's death, Pfefferberg convinced Keneally to write a book about him. Pfefferberg became Keneally's advisor, constantly offering him his help and traveling with him to Kraków and other places where Schindler lived and worked, and helped him find and interview over 50 people whom Schindler kept sheltered in his factory.

Keneally dedicated the finished book, originally titled as "Schindler's Ark" to the memory of Oskar Schindler, and to Pfefferberg - "who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written." If Keneally's briefcase had not broken, or if he would pick another store to search for a new one, this book would not exist - Oskar Schindler's story would very probably be written down or preserved in some other way, but not with so much success and interest that it has since generated, and would most likely not be adapted into a celebrated and beautiful movie by Steven Spielberg.

Keneally took the Capote approach to writing, presenting the story as "faction", or a non-fiction novel; he presented the information he gathered from his copious research in a literary way, and offered a reasonable artistic impression to fill in the blanks that were not preserved, or could not be recalled or witnessed by survivors. The book deliberately takes a literary approach to character development, though at the same time it is very conscious that its subjects are real people, and does its best to stay true to what can be known about them. The "plot" of the novel is often interrupted by insights and facts found by Keneally, to give the situation presented a deeper and fuller meaning and paint a larger picture. Keneallly took pride in his vast research, and was dismayed when the book was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1982: he stressed that the story was not fictional, and that he felt a responsibility to those who cherish the memory of Oskar Schindler to present is as accurately as possible, and that many of those whom he saved have read and corrected his manuscript.

Although the book features a diverse cast of supporting characters, it ultimately focuses on two people - Oskar Schindler, the industrialist who would save over a thousand Jews, and Amon Goeth, the camp commandant who delighted in killing them. Goeth is a complex character: he lusts after his Jewish maid but is unable to see her as an actual person, and these conflicted feelings cause him to beat and abuse her without mercy. Although he is conflicted in regards to his feeling for the maid and even deludes himself that they will grow old together, Goeth does not intend her to die naturally - in his selfishness, he wants to be the one to kill her instead of letting her be murdered in an anonymous gas chamber.

Oskar Schindler, on the other hand, is a man of much deeper and more interesting psyche. He is not the stereotypical "good German" - He is not only not opposed to the war, but works as an intelligence agent for the German secret service in his home country of Czechoslovakia, submitting the German government with information on railways and troop movements. Schindler hopes to profit on it; he joins the Nazi party because it is good for business, and he expected to conduct a business which would provide for his lavish lifestyle of a playboy and a womanizer. Although married, Oskar notoriously cheated on his wife and kept several mistresses; he schmoozes with the SS officials and has a seemingly endless amounts of expensive gifts to give always available at his disposal, which grant him a privileged position and a reputation of a man to whom it is worth providing a favor and whom it's not worth crossing. Enjoying wealth and privilege since his youth, Oskar expected to only multiply both during the war, always in the company of many beautiful women - by all accounts he should be a good hedonist, and not a good Samaritan.

So, how could such a man turn into the savior of over a thousand condemned souls? His complex character does not leave us with an easy answer. Schindler spent many a evening dining and partying with Amon Goth at his villa, and with time it became apparent that he was willing and capable to make a deal with the devil himself in order to save his Jewish workers. However, I think that he could only do that because there was a little of the devil in him - as a serial adulterer, a black marketeer he understood well the situation that he found himself in, and learned how to best get by and make a profit, and it is precisely this what allowed him to move comfortably and freely about the circles of high ranking SS officials, allowing him to bribe them to his own gain. A more pious man would not be able to stand Goeth and his clique, and his entire enterprise of saving Jews would have collapsed before it was even able to begin; only because he was a crook himself was Oskar able to outwit and fool other crooks, and only because he himself was corrupted could he understand how to corrupt and seduce others for his own gain.

According to his wife, Emilie, Schindler did not do anything remarkable before or after the war; his post-war life is a sad one, full of failed ideas and desolation. He tried starting again in Argentina, but failed and returned to live in Germany, leaving his wife behind to fend for herself. Although the many grateful Jews whom he saves regularly sent him donations and invited him to Israel to celebrate his birthday there every year, Schindler never established himself as a businessman ever again and usually squandered all of the money they gave him very quickly. He spent the remaining years of his life in a small one room apartment in Frankfurt, where he died alone in 1974. A friend who knew him then described him as a burned-out soul, who exhausted all of his energy on the rescue of Jews, and who did not have the strength to find his feet again.

At the same time, at the crucial moment in his life Oskar Schindler rose to the occasion and became a true rescuer of more than a thousand Jews, showing them incredible kindness which was virtually unheard of at the time; he treated and cared for his workers better than he did for his own wife. And their gratitude and appreciation for him was unending: as Itzak Stern, the man who ran Schindler's factory and who typed up the list of his workers, later remarked: "In the Hebrew language there are three terms, three grades: person, man, human being. I believe that there is a fourth one - Schindler."
The apocalypse of war was the ultimate test and a moment of truth for many people, and it brought out the truth of Schindler's and Goeth's respective characters: in Amon Goeth it brought out his fundamental monstrosity and innate evilness, in Oskar Schindler it brought out his innate goodness, decency and righteousness. There is no better way of describing the difference between the two men than the Tamudic verse from the Sanhedrin: Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.

Michael || TheNeverendingTBR

Rating: really liked it
What can you say about this novel that's not been said?

For the people who have been living under a rock somewhere this novel details a remarkable story.

Oskar Schindler's rescue of thousands of men, women, and children from Auschwitz, it's one of the most familiar narratives to arise out of the terrible events of the Holocaust.

I read this book around 2001-2002 and I remember I just couldn't put it down.


In a hundred years time, I am sure this book will still be amongst the greatest reads of all time for painting such a vivid picture of what that time in history was like for those that lived it.

Rob

Rating: really liked it
What a monumental piece of writing this turned out to be the research alone would have been prodigious. It does my head in just thinking of the time and money Thomas Keneally must have spent in gathering all the information needed to put this worthy story on paper.

What a horrendous experience the Holocaust must have been, not only for the Jews who’s tenuous hold on life hung by a thread most days of the week and they had to injure this situation for years, but for people Like Oscar Schindler that had to witness the horrors on a daily bases. Most right thinking Germans were powerless to help the plight of the Jews but Oscar Schindler was not one of them. Schindler built a factory to make enamel ware, A. to make money for himself and B. to supply the German army with some of the essentials of war. Schindler did in fact make a fortune from the factory but in reality the factory was just a front for, in reality, a safe haven for as many Jews as Schindler could take from under the noses of the SS guards.
Whilst Schindler did make a fortune most of that fortune was spent either bribing SS officers or, and providing his workers with the essentials of life.

What stands out for me in this telling of the life and times of Oscar Schindler was the symbiotic relationship that existed between Schindler and his Jews, as they were called, Schindler’s Jews. It’s a given that many of Schindler’s Jews owe their survival to the efforts that Schindler made for them but it is also a given that Oscar Schindler could never have achieved what he did without the help and assistance of many of his workers. For all his success as a businessman and entrepreneur during the war he was never successful in any of his endeavours after the war. So it’s safe to say that a lot of his success came from the business acumen of his Jewish workers.

This is a truly uplifting story but not an easy one to read. Not easy to be confronted with how quickly a society can be corrupted and go on to commit acts that defy understanding.

For all of the horror that was the holocaust we, as a species, have learned very little for here we are 75 years later on and these same like horrors are happening still, even as I write this review on the 16/07/2019. If for no other reason this telling and others like it need to be front and centre to remind us just what we are capable of.
Lest we forget.

Essential reading 5 stars.

Jenna Walker

Rating: really liked it
This is a wonderful book and a wonderful story, everyone should know what oskar schindler did for Jews in WW2. However, this book was very hard to read, like reading a research paper. Pfefferberg basically begged Keneally for an hour to write a book. because of that the first half of this book was very forced. i felt like he didnt want to write this, that his heart wasnt in this, Toward the middle of the book i flowed a little more but not until the last 8-10 chapters did it start to be easier to read. That is when i really got into this book. I felt too much like a teacher reading a very bland paper with no vivids and a lot of plain facts.

All of that aside, this book should be something everyone knows about, there are things i didnt know happened in WW2 in this book and anyone who cares about knowing anything about ww2 should read it. Oskar Schindler is/was a hero.

This book is so real and should not be taken as lightly as i took in in the first chapters, because once i finished i realized how much everyone should know about what schindler did.

( i gave it 3 stars for the difficulty in reading it and the research paper like quality of the literature)

Luís

Rating: really liked it
The stories of World War II are always poignant. Especially those who tackle the theme of concentration camps. This true story is no exception, and we come to hate Amon Goeth, the executioner of the Płaszów camp near Krakow. However, Oskar Schindler will be inventive to get the Jewish internees out of their clutches. Those named on Schindler's lists will escape death. It might have been a drop in the ocean, but every bit of life that could save with those lists was a victory over the enemy.

Travis Lambert

Rating: really liked it
Michelle and I gave up on Schindler’s List half-way through. Yes, I know, we’re philistines. While its historical and ethical value cannot be denied, I would rather read a history book. It’s just not much in the way of an actual narrative. There is very little personality in the characters and way too many disconnected characters and events. It reads more like a series of anecdotes about different people in the same location, and, worst of all, every page is a bewildering avalanche of names which is so perplexing that it is nearly impossible to tell the characters apart, and to tell the important characters apart from the unimportant. In fact, if it weren’t for the disconnected narrative episodes which provide the matter for these avalanches, I would say that the book reads like a veritable List of names. I think the problem is that Thomas Keneally couldn’t decide if he wanted to write a novel or a history book, and so what we have is the worst kind of historical fiction. I fully sympathize with the fact that Keneally wanted to be true to the real history and people on which his book is based, but if that conviction was so constricting that it was impossible to make a coherent and viable narrative, he shouldn’t have attempted the form of a novel. I realize that others may have more patience for this, but Michelle and I want to read a story when we read a story. We’re going to put the Steven Spielberg film at the top of our queue as penitence.

Roman Clodia

Rating: really liked it
Only 3-stars for this respected 'novel' which won the Booker? I'm so tempted to mark it up because the story deserves to be read by everyone, and the massive amount of research that clearly went into it is tremendous... but as a book? I have to say that I struggled.

Firstly, this isn't, of course, fiction - the story of how Keneally learned about Schindler through a chance meeting with Poldek Pfefferberg has been told in Searching for Schindler, a memoir which is brilliant on Poldek and the research (while very dull on Keneally's endless domestic life). Keneally, to his credit, spent years travelling around the world to meet with Schindlerjuden, the Jews and their families who survived through Schindler's actions. But perhaps because I read Searching first, Schindler's Ark didn't do quite what I expected.

For one thing, Schindler came across as a far more complex and ambivalent character in Searching: he was a member of the Nazi party from quite early on, he was recruited as a Nazi intelligence agent and one of his many girlfriends described him as 'a good Nazi'. In Ark, however, he's shown as being against the Nazis from pretty much the start of the book, determined to undermine their racial policies and save 'his' Jews as far as he can. It's the paradox in Searching that makes him so fascinating, and that seems to be flattened in Ark. Schindler is a courageous, righteous, inspiring man, no doubt, but at no point in Ark could he be described as 'a good Nazi'.

I was also surprised to see what a small role Poldek had in Ark and how personality-free he is given that he's such a wonderfully larger-than-life character in Searching. Perhaps Keneally didn't want to prioritise a single survivor in relation to all the others?

What does help to organise the 'novel' (or novelised treatment) is the angel/devil symbolism of Schindler versus Amon Goeth, the SS commandant with his unstable, pathological violence. Keneally goes out of his way to tell us more than once that though Schindler might have dinner and drinks with Goeth, he always loathed him. It's a crude stand-off between good and evil. It's not that I'm questioning the testamentary evidence from camp inmates of Goeth's volatile temper and frightening brutality - but how do we know what Schindler (who died before Keneally started researching the story) felt? I don't know - the whole good versus evil personified by these two men just felt very schematic to me.

There is a massive amount of information contained in this book and it's not always marshalled in the most effective way. Many many names are mentioned, a lot just once. It's important, of course, to document those names, individuals who, in many cases, didn't survive and deserve the memorialisation - but it can make for unwieldy reading.

And I think that's ultimately the impression I came away with: unwieldyness. There is a marvellous story here, one which is uplifting and awe-inspiring in its depiction of humanity in the face of systematic genocide. I still think we all need to read this book: I just found it more of a literary struggle than I expected.

Jill Hutchinson

Rating: really liked it
Made into an award winning film, Schindler's List (original title Schindler's Ark) is an intense biographical novel about Oskar Schindler and the Jews that worked for him during WWII.

Schindler was an industrialist who was obviously interested in making as much profit as possible from his contracts with the Nazi government. He had the Jews of the Cracow ghetto at his disposal for his labor force and used them in several of his factories. Most manufacturers worked their people to near death and then had them shipped off to the death camps, But Oskar Schindler was different although the book never really tells us why he took his pro-Jewish attitude. Pro-Jewish may be the wrong term for Schindler's activities on behalf of his workers but he daily faced serious trouble with the authorities for his protection of his employees.

He wined and dined, bribed, charmed, and greased the skids of the higher-ups in order to keep his Schindlerjuden (Schindler's Jews) safe, although many of them had no particular skills.. He covered for them and was twice arrested for a very short period of time when his activities were questioned. He had friends in high places and called on them when the Cracow ghetto was being liquidated as the Russian Army was drawing near. He enticed them into allowing him to open another factory, the reason for its existence rather vague, and moving his work force further west and hopefully out of harm's way. And this is where The List came into being.......a list that meant life or certain death for the remaining residents of the ghetto.......a list of people who would accompany Schindler to his new factory. He and his Jewish accountant connived to add names of people who did not currently work for him to the list which far exceeded the number approved by the authorities. And he succeeded. It is said that he saved more Jews from the gas chambers than any single individual during WWII.

The book is based on testimony from many of the Schindlerjuden and others that worked with Schindler during those last years of the war. He has been enshrined as a Righteous Person in the state of Israel and has a tree planted in his name on the Avenue of the Righteous which leads to the Yad Vashem memorial.

And remember, from the film, the little child in the red coat?.......it actually happened as witnessed by one of the Schindlerjuden and is one of the most poignant moments in the book and the film. A highly recommended book.