Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally is an extraordinary tale of the unlikely heroism demonstrated by a German industrialist during World War II. Keneally first heard the story of Oskar Schindler while in a California luggage store owned by Leopold Pfefferberg, a Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jew)—one of the Polish Jews saved by Schindler. From Pfefferberg, Keneally learned how the German businessman had risked everything, including his life and fortune, to save over a thousand Jews from Nazi death camps.
While the book is set in several occupied countries engaged in war during World War II, traditional battlefields are almost completely absent. The book focuses instead on the quieter, internal war the Nazis waged against the Jewish population. It is set in the factories, ghettoes, and labor camps where Germans first persecuted and later executed millions of European Jews.
Schindler's List is history constructed from the memories of those who lived it, presented in a form similar to that of a novel. The narrative includes stories of Schindler's actions to save the Jews, but also accounts from individual Schindlerjuden about their experiences running from Nazis, living in ghettoes, and surviving in Schindler's factory. When the book won the 1982 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, it generated a great deal of controversy. Even Keneally expressed surprise that the work, which he went to great lengths to present with historical accuracy, was classified as fiction. Despite its use of novelistic style, the book has come to be regarded as an important piece of historical nonfiction.
Steven Spielberg adapted Keneally's book into the award-winning movie Schindler's List in 1993. The popularity of the movie made Schindler's story one of the most well-known of the Holocaust and revived interest in the book ten years after its publication. Critics have praised the work of both Keneally and Spielberg for keeping the reality of the Holocaust alive in the minds of the contemporary public, and for not allowing the memory of the tragedy to die with the remaining survivors. However, both the film and the book have received criticism for representing the Jewish workers as passive pawns awaiting salvation by the kind German. Many agree, though, that the Jews in the book are depicted much less harshly than Schindler himself.
Fundamental to the book is the question of virtue. In ordinary circumstances, Schindler never would have been considered a virtuous man. He drank heavily. He had a wife, a mistress, and a girlfriend. He dealt in illegal goods, and took advantage of war as an opportunity to make money. However, when he became aware of genocide being carried out by the Germans, he devoted all his efforts to doing something about it. Many would have given up in the face of the magnitude of the tragedy, and in fact, many did. But Schindler, the consummate dealmaker, was able to bargain for the lives of at least a few among the many.
Although this is Keneally's only book about the Holocaust, his other books include characters similar to Schindler. In Sybil Steinberg's "Thomas Keneally: 'A Continuity of Theme,'" she describes this type of character as, "decent, ordinary men and women who become impaled on the horns of an ethical dilemma, compelled in one defining moment to follow a personal code of conduct no matter how difficult it becomes."
This complete Introduction contains 548 words. This
study guide contains 9,262 words (approx. 31 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our Schindler's List Access Pass.
