Schindler's List

Schindler's List

The Holocaust is a difficult topic to deal with as subject matter for a work of art; its horrors have been explicitly brought to light countless times in several different formats and knowledge of these horrors has pervaded our society such that nearly everyone has been exposed to them in some way or another. In order to tell an effective story about the Holocaust, one must do more than shock the reader with the evils that took place in concentration camps or Jewish ghettos--this has been done once and for all by those who lived through it. In his book Schindler's List, novelist and playwright Thomas Keneally goes beyond such shock value by telling of the profound goodness that emerged--from such unspeakable evil--in the character of prison camp Direktor Oskar Schindler and his Schindlerjuden.

Schindler's List, although based on the true story of the events surrounding Oskar Schindler's life during World War II--primarily how he came to save more than 1,100 Jews from the gas chambers by employing them in his factory--is technically a novel. However, the work is not fiction. As Keneally explains in his author's note, "fiction would debase the record...and I have attempted to distinguish between reality and myths that are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar's stature...most exchanges and conversations, and all events, are based on the detailed recollections of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler's Jews), of Schindler himself, and of other witnesses to Oskar's acts of outrageous rescue." In his telling of the story, Keneally's sure-handed prose adds credibility and its occasional delve into the poetic adds great emotional weight. The effect of such a telling is that of a slow toxin that siezes the reader by the heart and squeezes to the point of anguish, leading to a novel that is both deeply moving and absolutely believable.

As for the story itself, Keneally focuses mostly on the actions and ambitions of Schindler, leaving the horror stories recessed in the...