It is easy, Thomas Keneally remarks prefatorily, to chronicle the victory that evil generally scores over good, but "it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue". And Schindler's Ark is "'the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms". As if to palliate this artistic offence, Keneally hastens to assure us that "virtue" is not quite the right word for Schindler. True, he was ...

History would not normally be concerned with such a man as Oskar Schindler, a mere minor player in the sybaritic night life of a small Polish city during an unspeakable war. But history is not an exact science, and Oskar Schindler is remembered, as few men have ever been, in the testimony of 1,300 Jewish workers who escaped Poland's cities of death because Schindler, against every probability, became a possessed man, ready to risk everything in a daring, almost flaunted mission of rescue. The versati...

To conceive of the unendurable present as part of a story with a significant plot and uncertain outcome presupposed an outside world of shared meanings and moral continuity. It assumed human recognition; a day of reckoning. Because the Holocaust provides an objective correlative of Hell, outstripping the craziest nightmares and the cruellest dreams, the imagination is constantly challenged, and soon exhausted, by the effort of grasping it. As we know from government archives, Whitehall officials refused to ...

[Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (published in the United States as Schindler's List)] deals with Europe during the Second World War…. Schindler's Ark is largely documentary: the account of a Sudeten German industrialist who saved at least 1,300 Jews from the extermination camps. Based on interviews with those who knew him, it aims 'to use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story'. What makes this approach peculiarly appropriate is that Schin...

Documentary is a way of interrogating the world of fact, and of reintroducing us to the value of the craft that creates characters and narrative. Thomas Keneally in Schindler's Ark, which salvages the stories of 1300 survivors of the Holocaust, and attempts to characterise their improbable preserver Oscar Schindler, is deliberately entering a territory that, notoriously, still beggars imagination. The story he reconstructs is one that goes against the grain of the general horror, and reinstates a deg...

There can be no doubt that the story of Oskar Schindler is one of the more remarkable to emerge from the Second World War…. He was a swindler, a drunkard, and a womaniser. And yet, had he not been these things, he would not have been able to rescue hundreds of Jews from the concentration camps. Keneally is quite understandably fascinated by this story. And he writes a very vivid book about it. But a narrative is all it is, laced with anecdote…. The story is so important to him that he has shru...