Schindler's List
by Thomas Keneally
Summary
Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist, a member of the Nazi party, a heavy drinker and a serial adulterer who used forced Jewish labour in an enamelware factory in Krakow because it was cheap. By the end of the war he had spent his entire fortune bribing officials to keep roughly eleven hundred of those workers alive, and he never satisfactorily explained why.
Keneally builds the account from survivor testimony, and it began with a chance conversation in a Beverly Hills luggage shop owned by one of the men Schindler saved. The book stays close to the documented record and declines to invent an interior life for its subject, which is the correct decision and the reason it works: Schindler remains opaque, and his opacity is the moral problem the reader is left holding.
It is not a comfortable read. The liquidation of the Krakow ghetto and the operation of the Plaszow camp under Amon Goeth are given in detail.
A note on what to call it. The Booker was awarded to this book as Schindler's Ark, its British title. It was published in the United States as Schindler's List, which is the name most readers know and the one Spielberg used for the 1993 film.
At around four hundred pages it is longer than most readers expect and considerably less shaped than the film, since it follows the record rather than a screenplay. Read it if you want the documented history behind a story you probably know in Spielberg's version.
Historical Context & Significance
Schindler's Ark won the Booker Prize in 1982, and Thomas Keneally was the first Australian to win it.
The decision caused an immediate argument about category. The book uses the techniques of the novel but invents nothing, and Keneally insisted it avoided fiction throughout. Critics asked whether a work of documentary reconstruction was eligible at all. The judges concluded, resoundingly, that it was fiction, and the question has resurfaced periodically ever since.
Steven Spielberg's film of 1993 won seven Academy Awards and turned the book into one of the most widely read Booker winners, under the American title. Keneally preferred Ark, saying it named the covenant between Schindler and his workers, but the American title had already stuck and the film kept it. This archive records the book under the American title because that is the name most readers search for, while the prize itself was awarded to Schindler's Ark.