Customer Reviews

Schindler's List

5 star:		(69)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning, fictionalized biography of Oskar Schindler memorializes a member of the Nazi party who endangered his own life for four years, working privately to save Jews from the death camps. A playboy who loved fine wines and foods, he was also a smooth-talking manipulator (and briber) of Nazi officials, as well as a clever entrepreneur, already on his way to stunning financial success by the early days of World War II. Nowhere in Schindler's background are there any hints that he would one day become the savior of eleven hundred Jewish men and women.

While the excellent film of this novel concentrates on the dangers Schindler and "his Jews" faced daily throughout the war, Keneally, well known for his depictions of characters acting under stress, concentrates on the character of Oskar Schindler himself, beginning with his childhood and teen years. As he explores Schindler's transformation from war profiteer and "passive" Nazi to a man willing to use his fortune to ensure the salvation of his factory workers, Keneally reveals a man of enormous courage and derring-do, a man who thrives by living on the edge.

Presenting episodes from the lives of some of the "Schindlerjuden," Keneally highlights their humanity, creating moments of high drama. Characters such as Leopold Pfefferberg and factory manager Itzhak Stern move in and out of the narrative, illustrating graphically the extent to which their lives depend upon Oskar Schindler, while the constant intrusion of sadistic SS commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's life shows the fragility of their security. Other stories, of people who just missed being saved by Schindler, highlight the arbitrariness of fate--chance--in their (and our) lives.

Throughout the novel, Keneally stresses the importance of bearing witness and testifying to the atrocities. In one of the novel's most moving passages, Schindler and his lover ride horses to a ridge where they can view the expulsion of the Jews from the Krakow ghetto, watching, horrified, as old or crippled laggards are murdered in front of Jewish children. "They permitted witnesses because they believed the witnesses, all, would perish, too." Later, Schindler works with a Zionist rescue organization, secretly going to Budapest to testify about the hidden death camps.

Schindler's heroism, his goodness within a country committed to the extermination of other humans, his recognition that witnesses are essential, and his ability to use the system in order to hasten its end bring this story of one man's fight against the Holocaust to life. But it is Keneally's incorporation of Schindler's faults and excesses which gives texture and depth to this portrait and make Schindler a character with whom the reader can identify. Keneally's meticulous research and his portrait of Schindler after the war, beloved by Jews but at loose ends personally and professionally, make this novel an unforgettable study of character and time. n Mary Whipple

I saw the movie ten years ago so I thought I knew what to expect from this novel.

(By the way, this is a _fictionalized_ account of a story that is, for the most part, true, and is well-researched by the author)

This novel is very well written, and full of themes that apply today as much as they did during the holocaust. The thing I like about this story is it forces the reader to examine what makes a man good vs. what makes a man evil. Schindler starts the novel as a brilliant but self-serving war profiteer, exploiting his jewish workers in some of the same ways as the Nazi Party starts out doing. However, Schindler sees a few things that start him on the course to becoming a modern-day saviour, the most impressive image being the brutal killing of a little jewish girl whose beautiful red dress he had admired from across the ghetto.

The book is filled with shocking imagery such as this, which make it all the more moving, but not recommended for the faint-of-heart. There were many passages I read, after which I could feel my stomach turning.

Oskar Schindler saw all this first-hand, and you feel as if you do as well when reading this book. Schindler risked his life throughout the entire war to save thousands of jews who were completely dependent on him. The whole time he was also competing with an SS Captain who probably killed, on any whim, ten Jews for every one life that Schindler saved.

I would highly recommend this book, despite the fact that there are thousands of holocaust books on the market. This one transcends the setting.

This is Thomas Keneally at his best. The chance meeting with a Schindler Jew in a Los Angeles shop made a book, then a movie, then a global project to catalogue the stories of Holocaust survivors. It took Spielberg and Hollywood to bring the story to the screen but it was Keneally and his evocative text on the life of Oskar Schindler that bought the story to the world. His choice to use the texture of a novel works well. As the author said himself, this seemed the best way to handle a character with the ambiguity and magnitude of that celebrated Sudeten charmer.

But a novelist's approach also makes it easier to convey meaning, to explore and probe every shadow, each emotion, any nuance. Keneally's gift is to do this well. The highlight of the book is his brilliant study of Oskar and Amon, good with bad, the German bon vivant versus the Dark Prince. Like two heads of the same coin, Keneally shows nobility and evil as uncomfortably close bedfellows. There go I but the grace of God...

Keneally has a well-deserved reputation as one of Australia's greatest writers, but the forces this book has set in train, perhaps, have not been fully acknowledged. Fortunately, for a select group of southern Polish Jews in World War II, a saviour was in their midst. Fortunately, for those that followed, there was a writer who saved the saviour's story for us all.

It appears as though everyone loves the book and therefore I may be writing an unpopular review. However, though I think it is a valuable use of your time to digest Keneally's effort, I was a little surprised at its style and content. Now, I don't normally read fiction, so I probably don't have an adequate basis for judging good fiction, but when I saw it was a novel I figured it would be a pretty easy read.

I was surprised to find Keaneally's novel read a lot more like a biography--filled with facts, but not much of a plot. Most of the book is written in the narrative and there is very little dialogue. Though the facts are interesting and have valuable historical content, they do not read, at least for me, like a novel.

Also, the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the book is laden with German terms and words, which are in themselves educational and undoubtfully helpful for anyone who wishes to deny their ethnocentricity. However, I found the terms to be obtrusive to the flow of my read and found myself straining a little as the book got underway.

If you had the choice of reading the book or watching the movie, I would definitely recommend the book....the effort is worth your time. However, don't expect a light read. The book will flesh out the atrocity with greater detail and paint a picture of Schindler which is not quite matched by the movie. Hollywood seems to lack the objective approach. However, if you're not too interested in details, you don't mind a romanticized Schindler, and you have a hundred other books on your reading list, then see the movie and you'll probably still understand, at least in part, the essence of the Holocaust and the man with the list.

[My last review was botched in transmission. Please forgive the resubmission.]

The Holocaust is a difficult topic to deal with as subject matter for a work of art; its horrors have been explicitly brought to light countless times in several different formats and knowledge of these horrors has pervaded our society such that nearly everyone has been exposed to them in some way or another. In order to tell an effective story about the Holocaust, one must do more than shock the reader with the evils that took place in concentration camps or Jewish ghettos--this has been done once and for all by those who lived through it. In Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally goes beyond such shock value by telling of the profound goodness that emerged--from such unspeakable evil--in the character of prison camp Direktor Oskar Schindler and his Schindlerjuden.

In his telling of the story, Keneally's sure-handed prose adds credibility and its occasional delve into the poetic adds great emotional weight. The effect of such a telling is that of a slow toxin that siezes the reader by the heart and squeezes to the point of anguish, leading to a novel that is both deeply moving and absolutely believable.

As for the story itself, Keneally focuses mostly on the actions and ambitions of Schindler, leaving the horror stories recessed in the background, creeping around the edges. When such evils are brought to the forefront of the tale, they are potent and real, but somehow serve more as chiaroscuro to the divine goodness of Schindler's deeds. Thus it is that much more effective when Schindler spends every bit of his entire life's fortune to literally buy life for as many of the Jews as he possibly can. When all is said and done, Keneally has done no less than consecrate the sanctity of life by weighing its importance against that of essentially meaningless things such as money.

Schindler's List, by telling the story of a good man living in such evil times, has become an important addition to Holocaust literature.

"Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents." -comment by Emilie Schindler to a German TV documentary crew

This, of course, is the essential mystery of Oskar Schindler. How was it that this charismatic but morally ambiguous man, a failure in every other endeavor he ever engaged in, was both willing and able to save over a thousand Jews from Nazi predation? And, if someone like him was willing and able, why were other, arguably "better", Germans unwilling or unable to do the same?

These are the questions that Thomas Keneally's raises, but, despite the use of fictional techniques to tell the story, Keneally does not seek to answer them. Instead, he lays out the facts of the story (in thrilling fashion) and leaves the reader to search for answers. The result is an immensely human and interesting portrait of an enigmatic hero--infinitely more interesting than the simplistic black and white ubermensch of Spielberg's vapid movie.

Perhaps the greatest import of the book is that resistance was possible, even in Nazi Germany. In the face of this fact, those Germans who went along with the Nazis must be judged even more harshly. This book and Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners combine to make a powerful case for the view that the Final Solution was perpetrated by the German Nation as a whole and that most Germans were willing to see it happen. More than that, they raise the question of whether it is appropriate to consider the citizenry of totalitarian states to be merely innocent victims of the regimes, or whether we need to hold every citizen responsible for even the silent capitulation that enables a reign of terror to continue.

I know that Spielberg has made a big deal out of making his movie available to schools and young people; it would be much better to give them copies of this book. That a man like Oskar Schindler necessarily seems so remarkable to us, should be troubling to every person of conscience. This book forces us to look within and ask ourselves whether we too would have done the right thing. The answer is not as starkly clear as Hollywood would have us think.

GRADE: A

Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning, fictionalized biography of Oskar Schindler memorializes a member of the Nazi party who endangered his own life for four years, working privately to save Jews from the death camps. A playboy who loved fine wines and foods, he was also a smooth-talking manipulator (and briber) of Nazi officials, as well as a clever entrepreneur, already on his way to stunning financial success by the early days of World War II. Nowhere in Schindler's background are there any hints that he would one day become the savior of eleven hundred Jewish men and women.

While the excellent film of this novel concentrates on the dangers Schindler and "his Jews" faced daily throughout the war, Keneally, well known for his depictions of characters acting under stress, concentrates on the character of Oskar Schindler himself, beginning with his childhood and teen years. As he explores Schindler's transformation from war profiteer and "passive" Nazi to a man willing to use his fortune to ensure the salvation of his factory workers, Keneally reveals a man of enormous courage and derring-do, a man who thrives by living on the edge.

Presenting episodes from the lives of some of the "Schindlerjuden," Keneally highlights their humanity, creating moments of high drama. Characters such as Leopold Pfefferberg and factory manager Itzhak Stern move in and out of the narrative, illustrating graphically the extent to which their lives depend upon Oskar Schindler, while the constant intrusion of sadistic SS commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's life shows the fragility of their security. Other stories, of people who just missed being saved by Schindler, highlight the arbitrariness of fate--chance--in their (and our) lives.

Throughout the novel, Keneally stresses the importance of bearing witness and testifying to the atrocities. In one of the novel's most moving passages, Schindler and his lover ride horses to a ridge where they can view the expulsion of the Jews from the Krakow ghetto, watching, horrified, as old or crippled laggards are murdered in front of Jewish children. "They permitted witnesses because they believed the witnesses, all, would perish, too." Later, Schindler works with a Zionist rescue organization, secretly going to Budapest to testify about the hidden death camps.

Schindler's heroism, his goodness within a country committed to the extermination of other humans, his recognition that witnesses are essential, and his ability to use the system in order to hasten its end bring this story of one man's fight against the Holocaust to life. But it is Keneally's incorporation of Schindler's faults and excesses which gives texture and depth to this portrait and make Schindler a character with whom the reader can identify. Keneally's meticulous research and his portrait of Schindler after the war, beloved by Jews but at loose ends personally and professionally, make this novel an unforgettable study of character and time. Mary Whipple

Schindler's Legacy: True Stories of the List Survivors
Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activites, and the True Story Behind the List
Schindler's List (Widescreen Edition)

Although I have read previous works of fiction by Thomas Keneally, who is one of Australia's overlooked treasures, I picked up this particular novel (as have many readers) because I recently re-screened the movie.

I was especially heartened to realize that Spielberg stuck largely to the facts and the incidents related in this book. Even the girl in the red dress (which I was sure was a cheesy embellishment) really existed: her name was Genia and "in red cap, red coat, small red boots," she was the last of a column of evacuees who witnessed the cold-blooded execution of a family found hiding in the ghetto. Seeing Genia see the execution convinced Oskar Schindler the horror of what was happening: "They permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed the witnesses all would perish too."

Although this is a "novel," Keneally in the introduction is careful to stress he attempted "to avoid all fiction" while distinguishing between the facts and the myth of Oskar Schindler himself. That is, he uses the novelist's craft to re-create dialogue and reconstruct incidents to fashion a narrative that tries to explain why a seemingly amoral industrialist would go to such lengths--to risk his own life and to undergo (on three occasions) imprisonment by the SS--in order to save a community with whom he had the most tenuous connection. For this "novel," the author interviewed dozens of survivors and his book tries to sift and reconcile their various accounts and memories of a man whose life was otherwise unremarkable.

While most of us would like to think we would be as brave, it's almost impossible to explain Schindler's success, much less his motives. But, for two reasons, Keneally's book is hardly a hagiography: Schindler is presented as a deeply flawed, even selfish man, and the people he rescued proved to be equally courageous--and many of the survivors are presented in far more detail than is possible in a two-hour movie. The novel makes clear that this is as much their story as Oskar Schindler's; their survival was a coordinated effort by a large group rather than a miracle effected by one man. And Commandant Amon Goeth, whose villainy, incredibly, is even worse than the character depicted in the film, comes across not simply as an evil man but, in the end, a truly pathetic and cowardly one.

"Schindler's List" is not meant to be a history of the Holocaust. This biographical novel is set in a terrible time and a unique place, and its perhaps unseemly hopefulness can seem jarringly out of place for an epoch that had no silver linings. Instead, Keneally's (and Schindler's) underlying story is a lesson for us all: what might have happened if there had been not one, but one thousand Oskar Schindlers.

Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally's 1982 non-fiction "novel" about Oskar Schindler's transformation from a hedonistic bon vivant German (actually, Sudeten German, born in what is now part of the Czech Republic) war profiteer to savior of over 1,000 Jews during World War II, is one of the most fascinating accounts about the darkest chapter of that global conflict, the Holocaust. It vividly portrays the horrors of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish inhabitants in German-occupied Europe while at the same time proving that one person, no matter how flawed and contradictory in nature he or she is, can rise to the occasion and make a difference.

In his Author's Note, Keneally explains that he uses the oft-used technique of telling a true story in the format of a fictional account, partly because he is primarily a novelist (Confederates, Gossip From the Forest) and "because the novel's techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar." He also acknowledges the persistence of Leopold Pfefferberg, a Los Angeles leather-goods store owner and one of the "Schindlerjuden" -- the handful of mostly Polish Jews saved by Schindler from the SS by Oskar's use of his charm, connections with high Nazi Party officials, and ultimately, the fortune Schindler had gone to make in Krakow after Poland's surrender in the fall of 1939.

Like Steven Spielberg's 1993 Academy Award-winning film it inspired, Schindler's List (published in Europe as Schindler's Ark) describes how Schindler takes over a factory -- formerly owned by Jewish investors -- and makes a fortune selling, among other things, pots and pans to the German Army. But as the war goes on and Schindler sees first-hand the horrible crimes the Third Reich is committing in the name of the "Final Solution," the well-connected charmer and ladies' man becomes more concerned about saving lives than making money. First, he has a few fortunate Jews listed with the SS as "essential war-industry workers" in his Krakow factory; later, when he discovers that SS Commandant Amon Goeth has been given orders to dispose of every inmate and slave laborer at the Plaszow Labor Camp before the advancing Soviets reach Krakow, he spends all of his wealth paying Goeth and other corrupt SS officials for the lives of nearly 1,200 of the Jewish men, women, and children who form Schindler's workforce.

While Spielberg's movie faithfully captures the novel's account of the Holocaust years, Keneally's book gives the reader more details about Oskar's life before and after the war, including a short account of his prewar activities and his postwar business failures in Europe and Argentina. However, Keneally's focus is on Schindler's inspiring transformation from shameless and charming entrepreneur to "Righteous Person," proving that decency and righteousness can triumph over even the most implacable tyranny and hatred.

This poignant book by Australian author Thomas Keneally, was originally published as Schindler's Ark and in which Spielberg based his move. Schindler is a bragging, boozing opportunist who makes a fortune in Poland during the second-world-war German occupation, buying up the businesses of dispossessed Jews. We read about his black market deals, his backslapping relationship with the authorities, his parties and his mistresses - and gradually discover that his lifestyle is a façade, that his true activity is saving thousands of Jews from the gas-chambers. A remarkable man and a testement that we should never forget the terror that the Jewish people were subjected to during world-war-two.