Schindlers List

Secretly appalled by the deeds of his countrymen, Oskar Schindler set up a factory in which he sustained his workers on black-market food and protected them from deportation to death camps through his various wheelings and dealings and bribes of Party officials. Quite unexpected of a heavy-drinking, womanizing, Nazi Party industrialist, Schindler's personal risks and sacrifices showed unforgettable courage and grace to people whom evil had surrounded and systematically worked to destroy.

Keneally based his narrative account on the interviews of 50 Schindler survivors and on countless testimonies and documents supplied by Yad Vashem, The Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, by various wartime associates of Schindler's, and by many of Schindler's postwar friends. In the company of Leopold Pfefferberg, one of Schindler's survivors, Keneally visited Cracow, Plaszów, Lipowa Street, Zablocie, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, places associated with Schindler's operations and therefore prominent in the book.

A stunning novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden—Schindler’s Jews—to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction

From the author of the new novel The Daughters of Mars, Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.

Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction

Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.

Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.

young man, he planned to join the priesthood, but by 1960, on the verge of the Vietnam

War, Keneally found the church in such moral turmoil that he decided it was impossible

to go through with his ordination.

Keneally received his formal education in Sydney, Australia. Over the past 30 years, he

has published over 25 novels, more than a dozen screenplays, and several works of

non-fiction. These works include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The Playmaker,

Season in Purgatory, A Family Madness, and Woman of the Inner Sea. His work

has been nominated four times for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 for Schindler's

List. He won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, The Miles Franklin Award, The

Critics Circle Award, and a Logie (Australian Emmy).

A self-described "literary biker," Keneally has traveled through Australia, Iceland, Antarctica,

America, Eastern Europe, roaming across genres and topics, often championing the underdog.

"I'm a writer who's always been hard to pin down," Keneally says, "because I've sometimes

written about things that are none of my concern -- like the American South or Antarctica or

Australian aboriginals or the Holocaust. I think I appeal to 'hells angels' kind of writers."

Keneally has modeled many of his characters after the traditional Australian hero -- the

"battler." "In America everyone admires successful men and women. In Australia, they

suspect them. The Australian hero is the person to whom everything has happened --

drought, fire, flood."

Oskar Schindler is a classic Keneally character -- conflicted and flawed, the antithesis of a

one-dimensional altruistic saint. And Schindler's story is a classic Keneally story -- an

ordinary man placed in a situation of enormous moral dilemma.

While researching Schindler's List, the author spent two years traveling to eight countries, where he interviewed many of Schindler's Jews and read the numerous testimonies which

are held at the Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, Yad Vasbem, Israel.

Keneally lives in California where he teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of

California, Irvine, where he holds a Distinguished Professorship.

Reading Group Discussion Points

Other Books With Reading Group Guides

1. Schindler's List, while based on the true story of Oskar Schindler and the Schindler Jews, is fiction. At what point does this novel depart from the merely factual? What "liberties" does Thomas Keneally take that a non-fiction author could not?

2. At the start of the book, Keneally lets us know that his protagonist, Oskar Schindler, is not a virtuous man, but rather a flawed, conflicted one, who makes no apology for his penchant for women and drink; yet he gambles millions to save the Jews under his care from the gas chambers. How does Keneally reconcile these two distinctly different sides of Oskar Schindler? How do you, the reader, reconcile them?

3. Keneally writes, "And although Herr Schindler's merit is well documented, it is a feature of his ambiguity that he worked within or, at least, on the strength of a corrupt and savage scheme, one that filled Europe with camps of varying but consistent inhumanity." What abiding differences were there between Oskar Schindler and men like Amon Goeth, who operated the controls of this system? To what extent did Schindler remain in partnership with them? Where did he draw the line, and how did he keep himself separate while living among them?

4. Schindler and his mistress, Ingrid, ride their horses to the hill overlooking the Cracow ghetto, where they witness an Aktion. Trailing alone at the end of a line of people being marched off, Oskar and Ingrid spot a little girl in red, "the scarlet girl." What is it about her presence on this early morning that is instrumental in Oskar Schindler's sudden and terrible understanding of what is happening in Europe and of his responsibility to mitigate it?

5. "I am now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system," Schindler says after witnessing this Aktion. Do Schindler's subsequent actions defeat the system, or does he merely help to perpetuate it?

6. Keneally follows many other characters throughout the book: the prisoners, Itzhak Stern, Helen Hirsch, Poldek and Mila Pfefferberg, Josef and Rebecca, the Rosner brothers -- all of whom, at points, rise above their circumstances and engage in acts of great courage and generosity. In contrast, characters such as Spira and Chilowicz engage in acts of cruelty and self-interest. Yet they have similar circumstances. How do you feel about these different characters and their choices?

7. "All our vision of deliverance is futile. We'll have to wait a little longer for our freedom," Schindler says to Garde (a Brinnlitz prisoner) when they learn that the Fiihrer is still alive after an attempt on his life. Oskar speaks as if they are both prisoners waiting to be liberated, as if they have equivalent needs. What do you think Schindler means by "our freedom"? How might Schindler and other Germans have felt to be imprisoned? Is it fair for him to equate himself with Garde?

8. After Brinnlitz is liberated, some of the prisoners take a German Kapo and hang him from a beam. Keneally writes, "It was an event, this first homicide of peace, which many Brinnlitz people would forever abhor. They had seen Amon hang poor engineer Krautwirt on the Appellplatz at Plaszow, and this hanging, though for different reasons, sickened them as profoundly." Why are so many of the prisoners sickened, in light of the atrocities committed against them? Do you feel the prisoners would have been justified in killing as many Germans as they could have? Why do you think there aren't more rampant acts of vengeance on the part of Schindler's Jews after their liberation?

9. In a documentary made in 1973 by German television, Emilie Schindler remarked that Oskar had "done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since." She suggested that it was fortunate that between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who had summoned forth his "deeper talents." What are these "deeper talents" and what is it about war that elicits them? And what is it about peacetime that suppresses them?

10. After the war, Schindler never reached the level of success he'd known during wartime. Both of his enterprises, a farm in Argentina and a cement factory in Frankfurt failed, and he was to fall back on Schindler's Jews time and time again. They became his only emotional and financial security, and they would help him in many ways until the day he died. Keneally suggests that Schindler remained, in a most thorough sense, a hostage to Brinnlitz and Emalia. What might he mean by this? Do you agree?

11. What vision of human nature does Schindler's List express? Does it express the view of human beings as fundamentally good or evil? As immutable or capable of transformation? Does it leave you with any kind of a message, any vision for mankind? If so, what is it?

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Doubleday, 1967

Dita Saxova, Arnost Lustig

Northwestern University Press, 1979

The Holocaust in History, Michael Marrus

NAL/Dutton, 1989

The Jews: Stories of a People, Howard M. Fast

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Maus I and Maus II, Art Spiegelman

Pantheon, 1991

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One, By One, By One, Judith Miller

Touchstone Books, 1990

Sophie's Choice, William Styron

Vintage Books, 1979

Stones from the River, Ursula Hegi

Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995

The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945, Lucy Dawidowicz

Bantam Books, 1986

Winter in the Morning, Janina Bauman

The Free Press, 1986