Schindler's List — Originally published as Schindler's Ark

Oskar Schindler — Who He Actually Was

Thomas Keneally is careful not to let us mistake Oskar Schindler for a good man from the outset. The Schindler he introduces in the opening pages of this extraordinary book is a womaniser, a heavy drinker, a member of the Nazi Party, and an opportunist of considerable skill. When the Germans occupy Kraków in 1939 and the Jewish population is stripped of its businesses and assets, Schindler sees an opening: cheap labour, confiscated property, a chance to get rich in the chaos of conquest. He takes over an enamelware factory, staffs it largely with Jews from the Kraków ghetto because they cost less than Polish workers, cultivates the SS men who can make his operation possible, and proceeds to live very well in a city where other people are dying.

This is the foundation Keneally builds on, and it is an uncomfortable one. Schindler is not a secret resister hiding his true sympathies. He is a collaborator and a profiteer, doing what ambitious men do in wartime — finding the advantage in someone else’s catastrophe. What makes the book remarkable is that Keneally refuses to simplify the trajectory from this starting point to where Schindler ends up: a man who has spent his entire fortune keeping his workers alive and who weeps on the night of liberation because he could not save more. The moral evolution is real, but Keneally is honest that it was gradual, partial, and never fully explicable even to those who witnessed it.

The Schindler who emerges from these pages is a figure of genuine moral complexity — neither the secular saint of popular memory nor a cynical calculator. He was charming, corrupt, brave, vain, recklessly generous, and personally courageous in ways that cost him everything. Keneally does not resolve the contradiction. He presents it, and trusts the reader to understand that human goodness is rarely pure at its source.

The Lists

The mechanism of Schindler’s rescue was the list — the catalogue of names submitted to the SS as essential war workers, which meant the difference between staying in his factory and being transported to Auschwitz or Płaszów. The evolution of these lists is the book’s central story. Initially, Schindler’s register of workers was exactly what he claimed it to be: an economically useful workforce. As the liquidations intensified — as the Kraków ghetto was destroyed in March 1943 and Płaszów became a death camp under the sadistic Amon Göth — the list became something else. It became an act of rescue conducted in the language of administration.

Keneally follows specific Schindlerjuden through the years of the occupation: Itzhak Stern, the accountant who became Schindler’s essential partner and conscience; the families who appear and disappear through the machinery of persecution; the children hidden in the factory. These individual stories are what the novelistic form exists to carry. A history of the period can tell you that 1,200 people survived because of Schindler; only a novel can tell you who they were, what they feared, and what it meant on a specific afternoon to hear that your name was on the list.

The climax of this strand of the book is Schindler’s establishment of a sub-camp at Brünnlitz in Moravia in the final years of the war — a factory that existed not to produce anything useful but to keep his workers alive until the Germans surrendered. By this point, Schindler is spending his own money, bribing officials, and taking risks that have nothing to do with profit. The economic calculation has been replaced by something else, and Keneally is honest that he cannot entirely explain what.

Novel or History?

Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with a book he called a novel, and the decision was immediately controversial. Critics pointed out that the events were real, the people were real, and the documentary sources were meticulous. What justified the label “novel”? Keneally’s answer — that he used invented scene, reconstructed interior thought, and novelistic technique to bring the story to life — satisfied some readers and not others. The book has been reclassified repeatedly: “novel” in some editions, “non-fiction novel” or “narrative non-fiction” in others. The American edition retitled it Schindler’s List and quietly dropped the framing question.

What the fictional form allows Keneally to do is give access to interiority — to what Schindler thought when he bribed Göth, to what Stern felt watching his employer’s transformation, to what the workers discussed in the evenings. These moments are necessarily invented, or at least reconstructed from testimony. A conventional history would not include them, or would footnote them heavily. The novel form allows Keneally to assert them with the confidence of narrative, which makes the book more readable and more emotionally direct than a strict historical account would be.

Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film — shot in black and white, already long by Hollywood standards, and completely without commercial compromise — extended the book’s reach to audiences who would never have found it otherwise. The film is extraordinary, and Liam Neeson’s Schindler is a compelling performance, but Spielberg’s version is inevitably more coherent and more heroic than Keneally’s. The book’s Schindler is messier, more selfish, more genuinely opaque — and finally more interesting for it.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — One of the essential works of Holocaust literature, and a book that proves that the novel form can illuminate historical truth in ways that conventional history cannot reach.