An astonishing book about an astonishing man. The writer uses vivid and often horrifying personal accounts from many Schindler survivors to effectively present an authentic fictionalized memoir of Oskar Schindler and his personal fight to save many Jews from the death camps during the Holocaust. Beneath the carefree gambling, drinking and womanizing facade was the heart of a just, sympathetic, righteous and fearless man who cunningly manipulated the ranks of evil Nazi officers for his remarkable cause.
'In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and -- in the lapel of the dinner jacket -- a large ornamental gold-on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.'(opening lines)
'So the story of Oskar Schindler is begun perilously, with Gothic Nazis, with SS hedonism, with a thin and brutalized girl, and with a figure of the imagination somehow as popular as the golden-hearted whore: the good German.'(29)
'Destiny, said Herr Schindler senior, was not a limitless rope. It was a piece of elastic. The harder you went forward, the more fiercely you were jerked back to your starting point.'(39)
'Near the end of their talk, Oskar did say something that had novelty. In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He'd hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a pack of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.'(48)
'Then without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, "You'll be safe working here. If you work here, then you'll live through the war."... The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so much because she wanted to; not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.'(91-92)
'Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of passing on conviction, then there was no God and no humanity, no bread, no succor. There were, of course, only odds, and odds weren't good.'(92)
'The chambers of Belzec, Schindler found out from his source had been completed by March of that year under the supervision of a Hamburg engineering firm and of SS engineers from Oranienburg. From Bachner's testimony, it seemed that 3,000 killings a day were not beyond their capacity. Crematoria were under construction, lest old-fashioned means of disposal of corpses put a brake on the new killing method.'(136)
'Now, even if he and Dr. B made their decision, H didn't know if he had the rigor to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional dispassion. It was absurdly like the argument, in one's youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you'd decided, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.'(178)
'From late 1943, there is a story about Schindler which runs among the survivors with the electric excitement of a myth. For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer that truth itself.... Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double faced -- in the Greek manner -- as any small god; endowed with all the human vices; many-handed; subtly powerful; capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.'(232)
'But her father believed that Oskar would make a list of people and extricate them. Oskar's list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation. It was a List. It was a sweet chariot which might swing low.'(277)
'At some point in any discussion of Schindler, the surviving friends of the Herr Direktor will blink and shake their heads and begin the almost mathematical business of finding the sum of his motives. For one of the commonest sentiments of Schindler Jews is still "I don't know why he did it." It can be said to begin with that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which in the autumn of 1944, he prepared a final haven for the graduates of Emalia.'(281)
'He was mourned on every continent.'(closing line)
a Touchstone Book, Edition 1993
397 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for:100+ Reading Challenge
