Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally (1982)

At the end of World War II, the Jewish factory workers who had been saved from extermination camps by the German Oskar Schindler gave him a ring they had fashioned from the gold teeth donated by one of their number. The ring included an inscription from the Talmud which read, "He who saves a single life saves the world entire." This fictionalized history of Schindler's machinations that allowed him to save 1,200 Jews from the gas chamber was conceived when the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally was importuned by one of those survivors to tell the story. It is a fitting reply to anyone who has ever witnessed a wrong, yet has done nothing, asking, "But what can one person do?" This is what one person did.

Schindler's story is now widely known, thanks to this Booker Prize novel and even more so to the 1993 Academy Award winning movie directed by Steven Speilberg. Keneally resists the temptation to make this an emotional story or to cast a saint-like glow around its hero. His account reads like a conventional history, except that he uses his imagination to extrapolate the thoughts and reasonings of the characters. In his portrait, Schindler is an average industrialist who sees a way to make a profit from the war, one who enjoys the luxuries that money can buy and who is an unrepentant sexual philanderer. It is only when he sees the brutality of some of his fellow Nazis and realizes what the Nazi Final Solution is to the perceived Jewish problem that he changes his goals, and through bribery and the trading of favors connives to protect his factory workers from certain death.

This is not an easy book to read, both because of its matter-of-fact representation of almost unimaginable atrocities and of its history-like presentation of people and places with unfamiliar names and titles. But it does reward the reader with a very true account, I believe, of a man who saw a wrong being committed and did what he could to remedy it.

We could all take a lesson from Schindler.