Schindler's List: Seeing Clearly in Times of Darkness
Written: Jun 14 '02 (Updated Jan 19 '04)
Product Rating:
Pros: Intimate portrait of an ordinary man performing extraordinary acts of humanity
Cons: Man's capacity for inhumanity
The Bottom Line: Set against the conflagration of forces that was the Holocaust, Schindler's List portrays a man who acted on his own sense of justice to save lives.
DAnneC's Full Review: Thomas Keneally - Schindler's List
Herr Oskar Schindler, as author Thomas Keneally was quick to note, was an unlikely hero. Handsome and charming, Schindler's ambitions focused on acquiring wealth and achieving personal gratification. In any age that had remotely resembled "normal"--even during a normal war--he would have been a good-natured wheeler-dealer who simultaneously put those around him at ease and indulged his own ample appetites for comfort, fine cars, women, and alcohol. But as a German in World War II against the backdrop of the Holocaust, Oskar Schindler's remarkable sense of inner balance allowed him to become one of the most extraordinary of beings: He proved himself to be a just man. Schindler's List (originally published as Schindler's Ark) chronicles that journey.
A natural opportunist, Schindler had a talent for sizing up people and situations--and he did so quickly and accurately. Shortly after the war began, Oskar left his home in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) and headed for occupied Poland, where he planned to make his fortune as a wartime industrialist. His genial nature and his personal lack of prejudice against Jews led him to form useful alliances among a people in the process of being dispossessed. Initially, these alliances were largely practical. The Jewish professionals associated with Oskar's potential acquisitions had intimate knowledge of the corporate history and wartime potential of the businesses in question. And certainly the Jews were available. In 1940, few Poles or German Aryans were willing to risk forming new alliances (or maintaining old ones) with Jews.
Schindler's personal epiphany seems to have occurred as a result of the roundup and massacre of Jews that accompanied the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. The causal murder of scores of men, women, and children--murders that he witnessed without being challenged by the murderers--convinced him beyond doubt that the annihilation of European Jews had been elevated from being a mere convenience of wartime anti-Semitism to enjoying official status as state policy. Experiencing a sudden clarity of vision, Schindler responded to his new knowledge by providing shelter and protection to as many Jews as possible until the war ended. For, as he seems to have instinctively realized, Germany simply could not win the war while it focused its energy and squandered its resources on the mass murder of innocents.
The character study that is part and parcel of Keneally's book is fascinating. It is a worthy treatment of one man's response to an extraordinary series of events. As the personal story of Oskar Schindler, bon vivant and Righteous Gentile, it is a heart-warming account of personal honor. Indeed, in terms of the psychology of choice, it may be that the most important thing Keneally has accomplished with Schindler's List is to provide an example of how one person, an individual with the inner wisdom to respond to the face of evil as it exists rather than as it is presented for public consumption, can truly make a difference.
In the final analysis, however, one comes to accept the irony that Oskar Schindler's ability to succeed in his effort to save the lives of so many Jews did not come in spite of the apparently contradictory aspects of his character, but because of the interaction of so many disparate elements. Thus his sense of justice came to be served by his outrageous audacity, his willingness to exchange time and pleasantries with the architects of evil, his ability to bribe and steal whatever and wherever necessary, his eagerness to cheat the system he worked so effectively, and the persistent risks he took to save just one more life. Schindler's List will thus challenge the foundation of belief for anyone who clings firmly to the ideal of moral simplicity.
Further, in detailing a keystone event in the personal stories of the hundreds of Jews--the Schindlerjuden--whose lives Schindler saved, this book serves as a study in how and why and to what result personal alliances are formed in times of great need. As Keneally demonstrates, those times did not end with the Holocaust and the Second World War. During the postwar years, the people Schindler saved went about the task of building new lives, but their bond with Oskar and his fate continued. In those years, "Schindler's Jews" repeatedly returned the favor to their former benefactor. They became his saviors in times of financial and emotional need.
Were Schindler's List a genuine biography, it would fall naturally into the "survivor" literature of the Holocaust. It is thus a worthy irony that, as a fictional biography based largely on fact, it offers readers an even greater sense of objectivity than do the many memoirs, diaries, and biographies that depict the Holocaust without the benefit of literary license. The book is also unique in that it views the Holocaust not only from the perspective of a German--but a German who could accurately be categorized as a war profiteer who benefited from the work of Jews caught up in the net of the Nazi slave labor system.
Very little about the history of the Holocaust or its continuing legacy has proven to be simple or straightforward. The complex interactions in the character of Oskar Schindler at once reaffirm faith in the inherent goodness of the human spirit and force painful questions about the complicity of silence that figured so large in the events of that era. If Schindler found the wickedness of the Third Reich's policy of annihilation to be so obvious and thought a proactive response to be so necessary, how is it that there were so few instances of those who undertook the task of saving lives on a similar scale? For anyone interested in the myriad of issues touched by the Holocaust and the response it evoked, Schindler's List should be required reading.
In a new hardcover edition, here is the story of how Oskar Schindler, a German-Catholic industrialist, came to save more Jews from the gas chambers th...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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