Schindler’s Ark
Schindler’s Ark, historical novel by Thomas Keneally, first published in 1982 and based on the life of German industrialist Oskar Schindler. It was adapted as the film Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, which won seven Academy Awards. Schindler’s Ark was also published under the title Schindler’s List.
Schindler’s Ark begins with an author’s note from Keneally describing the chance encounter with Leopold Pfefferberg, a “Schindler survivor,” that prompted him to write the story of Schindler, and his efforts to make his book as factual as possible. Schindler is described as a “bon vivant, speculator, charmer.” The book traces his journey from being an industrialist and member of the Nazi Party to risking his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The novel sketches Schindler’s passage from his childhood in Moravia to his arrival in 1939 to Kraków, where he gained ownership of an enamelware factory. Connections and bribery were necessary for a successful business, and Schindler was a master practitioner of those arts. He found violence repugnant, however, and he did not share the Nazi animus against Jews. As the net around the city’s Jewish population tightened, Schindler employed increasing numbers of Jews in his factory. When in 1942 the Płaszów labor camp opened, Schindler persuaded its vicious commandant, Amon Göth, to allow his factory to operate as a labor camp outside the walls of Płaszów, where he was able to see that the workers were treated far more humanely than those within the walls. When Płaszów and his factory/labor camp were decommissioned in 1944, Schindler was able to have it moved to Brnĕnec in the Sudetenland, ostensibly to manufacture munitions. He compiled a list of 1,000 Jewish workers that he needed to operate the factory, and, though some were transported to concentration camps instead, including a group of 300 women, Schindler succeeded in getting them all sent to his new factory. They were joined by another large group who had been abandoned in train cars on their way to a concentration camp as the war was winding down.
Winning the Booker Prize on its publication in 1982, Schindler’s Ark is a “novel” deeply embedded in the trauma of modern European history, a story that, Keneally insists, attempts to avoid all fiction. Driven to understand how Schindler evolved from a man trying to make a profitable living to one who focused his skills singularly to save as many Jewish lives as he could, the book combines historical research with imaginative reconstruction to portray the complex and provocative character of Oskar Schindler. In the process, Keneally draws his readers into the world of those condemned by the Nazis as a form of “life unworthy of life.” He examines the volatile mix of political violence and sexual sadism that prompts one of the most unsettling questions in the book: “What could embarrass the SS?”