SCHINDLER'S LIST
Novel by Thomas Keneally, 1982
As the author of numerous historical novels, Thomas Keneally has been at once daring in what he imagines of characters' motives and rhetoric and conservative in his respect for his sources. The provenance of his novel Schindler's List (first titled Schindler's Ark, 1982) was the chance testimony of one of the so-called Schindlerjuden, a group of Jewish prisoners of the Nazis who were saved from the Holocaust. Keneally heard the story at the Los Angeles luggage store of Leopold Pfefferberg. From his account Keneally would reimagine a short period in the life, if never fully attempt to comprehend the motives, of the womanizer, drinker, and dandy, the indulgent libertine Oskar Schindler. This businessman and factory owner would elect—at the risk of his own life—to save from destruction his Jewish employees at Zablocie, in Poland. As a result of his perilous exertions, more than 1,000 of them survived World War II.
Part of Schindler's fascination for Keneally was this uncompelled, reckless, unquestioning generosity of spirit. Nothing in Schindler's past had anticipated or could explain what would "obsess, imperil and exalt him." Nothing in what the novelist depicts of Schindler reveals, retrospectively, the forces that energized him. Here is a rare instance of good works in action, along with the challenge to art that this represents. (As Keneally wryly remarked, "Fatal human malice is the staple of narrative.") Although alert to danger, Schindler was equally indifferent to self-justification, publicity, or posterity. As for the Schindler survivors, in Keneally's interpretation "the sum of his motives" would remain imponderable, their rescue a blessing hardly possible to credit.
Inspired initially by the astonishing gift of the Pfefferberg story, Keneally would interview 50 of those whom Schindler had protected, in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Israel, West Germany, and the United States. In company with Pfefferberg he traveled to the forced labor camp at Plaskow, which had been commanded by the homicidal SS officer Amon Goeth, to Oskar Schindler's enamel factory in Zablocie, and to Auschwitz. This was the footslogging research of a historian whose imagination would be stirred by actual sites of horror—and hope. Yet as Keneally wrote in the author's note to Schindler's List, while "I have attempted to avoid all fiction … since fiction would debase the record," nonetheless he had to relate this true story by means of fictional techniques, by practicing "the only craft to which I can lay claim." Herein, incidentally, was the nub of the controversy over the award of the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction to Schindler's List.
At key moments in the novel Keneally appears to renounce or at least to qualify his claims. Early on he states bluntly that this is "the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms." It is as if an inventory of the saved will of itself generate wonder. Nowhere near so evident, as argued above, is the driving force for Schindler. Indeed at times the author seems amazed at the events that Schindler set in train and on which so scrupulously he based his narrative. Later in the book, as Keneally leads readers down the "Kafkaesque corridors" of the SS complex in Kraków, we are given the names of the departments. Revulsion arises from this dutiful documentation rather than the flourishes of art: "the SS Main Office, the headquarters of the Order Police … Jewish Affairs … Peace and Resettlement … the Reichskommisariat for the Strengthening of Germandom." By means of an antistyle, the bureaucratic complement of an evil ideology is starkly displayed.
Many of Keneally's characters live in terrible jeopardy. In Schindler's List the Kraków Jewry are one of the most desperate groups of them. They cling, deludedly, "to the idea of the ghetto as a small but permanent realm." Those who survive its destruction and are taken into Schindler's factory live an oxymoron. Their life, Keneally writes, is one of "fragile permanence." Schindler's miracle, or conjuring act, is to sustain that condition long enough to enable these people to last until the end of the war. For those who survive, the list of the names of those whom Schindler would attempt to save "is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins is the gulf." The abysmal terror, the paralyzing uncertainty of their plight, is never dissembled, nor does Oskar Schindler's near desperate charismatic appeals to the German authorities distract us from it.
For all that he is skeptical of legends and legend making, Keneally's novel (and the Spielberg film based on it) contributed significantly to "the Oskar legend." He cautions that, in the scale of the annihilation of Jews in the Holocaust, "Oskar was only a minor god of rescue." Yet in the telling of the story, Keneally has made us acquainted with numerous individuals whom Oskar saved, with more than "statistics, unsubtle terms." It is a further paradox of Schindler's life, in Keneally's reckoning, that "the peace would never exalt him as had the war." After the war Schindler failed in businesses, moved from country to country, and was supported by some of those whom he had protected. That war and the Holocaust "summoned forth his deeper talents" is a strange and fortunate irony of history. It was also an enduring source of gratitude for those survivors who mourned Oskar Schindler "in every continent" when he died in October 1974.
