Thomas Keneally

(16) Every year around this time, I do a re-read. This year, I read a book after I had seen the movie. In this case I saw the movie many, many years ago when it first came out in the theater and was incredibly moved. I see this book is classified as fiction, but it reads as if it were non-fiction, memoir and per the author's note, - it is very much based on a true story though does not claim to have all the details just right and parts of conversations are simply guessed at. I think calling it fiction is unfair. Schindler was a German war profiteer and businessman who employed Polish Jews in his enamelware factory that ultimately became a concentration camp. This story of this unlikely character giving up all his possessions and risking his life and livelihood to go against the monstrous grain and save as many people as he could is truly amazing. I still don't understand how such barbarous and inhuman things happened. Happened in a civilized country in very modern times. I haven't really dwelled on the Holocaust in a long time given the 24 hour news cycles and the everyday ostensible horrors that actually all pale in comparison to what happened.

You know it has to be a true story because Oskar Schindler was so far from perfect. His post-War life was a hot mess and his fidelity and habits are very much NOT Hollywood. Kennedy writes the book with simple prose and fairly declaratively. No melodrama, no poetry - but the facts really spoke for themselves and much of the artistic license he did take insightful. It was not overly graphic but there were some haunting images - the Musselmaen concept, the girl in the red cap, the teeth the jeweler had to appraise.

I can remember being speechless in the movie and I will watch again soon. One wonders if you would have the courage to truly stand up to evil. What do you tolerate to save your own skin and to hold on to your own well-being and family? The most powerful part about this book is the gradual acceptance of what was being done to Jewish people - first just restrictions, then loss of property, then forced to dwell elsewhere, then forced labor, then extermination of the weak, then just extermination. Even the people to whom it was happening were like the proverbial frogs in slowly heated up water. Excellent important story well written. A must read.… (more)

I've wanted to read this book since coming back from Poland, where we spent most of our time in Cracow. My abiding memories of our visit centre on our stay in the former Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, and of visiting the former ghetto in Podgórze, and of course Auschwitz-Birkenau. This background informed my reading and my appreciation of this book.

This illuminating account has at its heart the extraordinary character of Schindler, womaniser, bon-viveur, heavy drinker, businessman ..... and saviour of the Jews. He's an unlikely hero: audacious, willing to resort to bribery, and entirely unrelenting once he had got the bit between his teeth. Set alongside his story is that of the Jews of Krakow, their personal histories, degradations and gradual loss of autonomy. And the stories of his wife and lovers, and the German high command whom he had to keep on side to achieve his objective of saving the Jews whom he was able to employ.

This is an uncomfortable, painful book to read. But for an understanding of the humiliations and suffering of the Jewish people under Nazi occupation and beyond, and for a glimpse at the lives of those heroes (and Schindler wasn't alone) who made a difference to the fates of some of them, this is unbeatable.… (more)