Searching for Schindler by Thomas Kenneally – Reviewed by Ted Odenwald
New York: Doubleday, 2007
“Making-of” books are not wildly popular. The work of art’s the thing that captures our attention. But this work is different in that seemingly out of nowhere a fiction writer came up with a three-decade-old true story, hidden in the shadows of the horrors of World War II. The combination of a fascinating protagonist, an extensive collection of corroborating accounts by appreciative recipients of this man’s protection, and the microcosmic view that this story provided of the Holocaust made the project a must. The author now reveals how he put together the award-winning “novel” Schindler’s List, the direct source for the academy-award-winning film.
In 1980, Australian novelist, Thomas Keneally, walked into a Los Angeles handbag boutique, hoping to purchase a briefcase. By the time he left the shop, he had bought into the shopkeeper’s compelling argument that there was great material to be found in the history of Oskar Schindler, a German citizen from Moravia, who was revered by many Jewish survivors of World War II. Keneally’s source, Leopold Pfefferberg, a.k.a. “Poldec,” had survived the Holocaust, primarily because of Schindler’s efforts. Poldec and thousands of Jews owed their lives to this man.
In Searching for Schindler, Keneally retraces his journey through the extensive research process, through the creative focusing of the raw material, to the actual publication of the novel, called Schindler’s Ark in Great Britain and Schindler’s List in the United States. His journey with this story continued into a failed effort to write the script for Stephen Spielberg’s film version of the “novel.” Interestingly, though Spielberg chose to replace Keneally, the director/producer kept the author close during most phases of the production, even allowing him to mingle with the performers.
Keneally realized that Poldec had presented him with the vision of a powerful piece of writing. The complexity of Schindler’s character was fascinating. He was certainly heroic in turning his labor camp factories into refuges for many who otherwise would have ended up in death camps. He even took a great risk in rescuing a trainload of workers from Auschwitz-Birkenau after the SS had misrouted them to the camps for extermination. Yet, he was clearly a scoundrel deeply involved in war profiteering and in black marketeering. He was a womanizer, who frequently betrayed and eventually deserted his devoted wife, Emilie. To the novelist, Oskar’s “ambiguity was the whole point of the tale.” He was the personification of a paradox which novelists love: “the despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man turned munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero, operating in a “morally inverted time.”
The author also saw that Schindler’s story was of great historical value, “…reduc[ing] the Holocaust to an understandable, almost personal scale.” Oskar had been there for every stage of the process. “If one looked at the Holocaust using Oskar as lens, one got an idea of the whole machinery at work in an intimate scale, and …how that machinery made an impact on people with names and faces.” The Australian novelist had “stumbled upon” the tale. “I had not grasped it. It had grasped me.”
Major sections of this book deal with Keneally’s world-wide search for documentation of the rumored stories. With Poldec as his guide, the author interviewed Schindler’s wife, Emilie, and several Schindlerkinde, “those who had survived the war as children but still were haunted by the war.” In Krakow, Poland, he explored the Jewish ghetto, and visited Emalia, Schindler’s enamel company, interviewing several survivors who had chosen to close out their lives near the locations of their travails. In Vienna, he searched fruitlessly for the family of Amon Goeth, the sadistic, murderous commandant of Plaszow Labor Camp. Poldec then led Keneally through several cities in Israel, where the author recorded stories of many survivors; interestingly, Schindler had visited many of these people every year for a decade after the war.
Blessed and burdened by enormous amounts of material from interviews as well as from official documents, Keneally struggled to focus his work. Even the title created difficulties. The author wanted to use the title Schindler’s Ark, evoking both Noah’s ark and the Ark of the Covenant, the latter being “… a symbol of the contract between Yahweh and the tribe of Israel. The author felt that a similar compact existed between Schindler and his people. If they did their work properly—if they appeared to be producing for the sake of covering his black-market activities—then he will rescue them.” Hodder, Keneally’s British publisher, complied with his wishes for the title, but Simon and Schuster, his American publishers, felt that “Ark implied passivity, the prisoners entering two by two.” The publisher feared that this connotation would offend American Jewry.
Keneally’s accounts of his connection with Spielberg’s production are ambivalent. Originally hired to write the script, he was fired after two years on the project because Spielberg felt that the author’s material could not “escape the feel of a documentary.” Yet the director’s gratitude to his disappointed source never diminished. He invited Keneally to witness and advise in most parts of the production, and insured that the author received all due honors when the film opened –and when it received great critical acclaim.
Searching for Schindler records an outsider’s fascinating odyssey into the soul of a world “of inverted morality.” Guided by his unlikely muse, a handbag salesman, the novelist immersed himself in the stories of people who owed their survival to an extraordinarily complex character whose opportunism was overshadowed by his humaneness and his altruism.
Ted Odenwald and his wife, Shirley have lived in Oakland for 39 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust. Ted is also the Worship Leader at the Ramapo Valley Baptist Church in Oakland.