Thomas Keneally: Schindler's List

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An astounding history of Oskar Schindler
Thomas Keneally's Man Booker Prize winning novel about how Oscar Schindler saved around 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust is one of the most astounding factual historical stories I have read. Many of you will have seen Spielberg's excellent film of "Schindlers' List". The novel on which it is based gives the reader a better understanding of Schindler than can be conveyed in a 3 hour movie.

Keneally was inspired to write the book when he met Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor, who had extensive files about Schindler. Before writing the book Keneally had discussions with survivors (mostly "Schindlerjuden" - Schindler Jews) in many countries, including  Australia, Israel, West Germany, Austria, the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. Keneally uses the devices of a novel to describe the enigmatic and ambiguous character of Schindler and how he risked his own life to help many Jews and eventually to save some of them from the death camps. Keneally dedicated the book to Pfefferberg: "who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written."

Oskar Schindler was born in Austria but moved to Cracow in Poland just before the war. There he acted as a model German as a member of a party affiliated to the Nazis and wore a Swastika lapel badge. Oskar was a salesman and a dealer by temperament who knew that at that time when you went in to a German company manager wearing the badge, you got the order. Through his many contacts Schindler profited from the Jewish demise, gaining a large apartment and acquiring an enamel factory making cooking and eating utensils in great demand by the military. He employs many Jews in his factory at low wages who are being forced by the SS to live in the cramped and increasingly dangerous Cracow ghetto.

Schindler is an enigmatic character, an entrepreneur and salesman, a womaniser, a boozer, a black marketeer, and a manipulator who is never afraid to use any form of bribery to get what he wants. His social and drinking circle includes most of the senior SS in the region many of whom are violent sociopaths involved with the ultimate solution to the "Jewish problem". Even when he gets permission to set up his own camp next to his factory and provides extra food for the prisoners at his expense from the black market he was still socialising with SS officers in charge of death camps. His womanising continues and he was even spotted by his staff when he was skinny dipping in a water tank with an attractive, and frequently brutal, female SS guard.

Why did Schindler finish up risking his life to help and save so many Jews? You will have to read this meticulously researched book to attempt an answer. One suggestion in the book is that one day Schindler saw the SS expelling Jews from the Cracow ghetto, and executing those who didn't comply. He experienced an epiphany so that “Beyond this day,” he would claim, “no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”

This is a fascinating, memorable but frequently brutal masterpiece of a book. It is a an inside story of one of the most terrible times in human history. Keneally tells the story in a somewhat dispassionate way that allows the reader to try to understand what really happened. It is also a good news story - for the few Schindlerjuden - and is emotionally heartwarming as they supported Schindler after the war. Many of the the Schindlerjuden became successful in business, qualified as doctors and lawyers, and became Judges and influential members of their adopted countries. Israel acknowledged what Schindler did and his final resting place is in a Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem.

Thomas Keneally: Shame and the Captives

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A major cultural misunderstanding
This is an interesting and challenging book about one of the three main events where WWII impacted directly on the Australian people. Most people know about the bombing of Darwin and the mini-submarine attack on Sydney Harbour, but how many know about the bloody escape by Japanese POW's from a  camp near Cowra, NSW?

During WWII Australian troops captured many prisoners of war on all battlefronts. While some of them were sent to POW camps near where they were captured, by August 1944 there were nearly 20,000 POW's in Australia. Most of them were Italians, but just over two thousand were Japanese most of whom resented the fact that they had not been killed - "The Japanese soldier never permits himself to be taken".

Keneally weaves a fictional story based on the Cowra POW breakout which shows the conflicting culture and emotions of the local people, the camp administration and the different prisoner nationalities. In a fictional town of Gawell, on the tablelands of NSW and far from the battlefronts, a POW camp is built close to a farming community to house European (mostly Italian), Korean and Japanese prisoners. The camp is split into 4 compounds, 2 for the Europeans, 1 solely for Japanese (Compound C) and the fourth for captured Japanese merchants, and Koreans and Taiwanese.

The camp commanders have little understanding of the cultural stresses Japanese prisoners are facing with the disgrace of their capture. Many Japanese give false names, knowing that their families would have been told of their death because they are missing. Many look to death as the only way out of their incarceration and do not understand the compassion and respect given to them by their captors.

Keneally weaves a gentle story of the local community and the integration of trusted Italian prisoners, and the camp commanders and their naive feelings that they should run the camp humanely within the Geneva Convention in the hope that Australian prisoners will also be treated humanely by the other combatants. The camp is lightly guarded because a breakout is considered unlikely. The camp is commanded by officers who are in general mostly too old or injured to fight overseas. What surprised me most by this fictional re-enactment of the breakout was the inept, almost Dad's Army reaction, of the guards and the local training camp to the escape of hundreds of Japanese prisoners from Compound C searching for death.

This is an interesting and sensitive tale based on an important incident in Australia's WWII history. I have recently read Keneally's splendid WWI saga "Daughters of Mars" and in comparison found the writing style of this book to be much dryer and less inspiring than his previous book.

Thomas Keneally: Daughters of Mars

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Remarkable book about remarkable events
This is an epic novel written by a talented novelist about one of the most horrific conflicts in modern history. I have read a lot of novels based on WWI but this one has some of the most searing scenes outside of the battlefield written with totally researched detail and great emotion. Other books look directly at actions of war - this one looks at the consequences of war through the eyes of two sisters from Australia who nurse the wounded off Gallipoli and on the Western Front.

The Durrance sisters, Naomi and Sally, were born in the Macleay Valley of NSW. The eldest, Naomi, leaves home to become a nurse in Sydney while Sally stays home and becomes a nurse at a local hospital. They briefly come together again when their mother is dying of cancer and share a common bond with her death that should bring them together.

At the outbreak of war both sisters enrol as nurses and move from the cosy backwater of rural Australia to Egypt, and to a hospital ship operating off Gallipoli which gets sunk by torpedoes. After surviving the sinking they both move to different medical facilities on the Western Front. There is still no strong bond between the sisters until Naomi suggests that they should become friends. While they become closer as the war continues, Naomi observes later that the war itself becomes "a machine to make us true sisters".

The nursing action encompasses all the destructive elements of modern warfare on the human body, plus the awful damage from different kinds of gas, and shell-shock (not recognised at the time by the medical and military fraternity and labelled "Not Yet Diagnosed") plus the destructive forces of Spanish Flu that kills so many from 1918 onwards.

While nurses of all allied nations are the key players, Keneally introduces us to a couple of memorable characters. Matron Mitchie from Australia, a practical and approachable leader at a time when Matrons' ruled their nurses in a military manner, and Lady Tarlton, the wife of an English aristocrat who has strong Australian connections, who organises her own voluntary hospital on the Western Front using every contact she has in the establishment plus her own money and organising skills to make it happen.

This is historical literary fiction of  the first order. This tale is skilfully written, sometimes with excruciating detail. There are a few warts in the story but not enough to affect my emphatic 5 star rating. At first I found the writing a bit difficult to follow because Keneally mostly uses quotation-less dialogue but I quickly realised that this allowed him to describe action and interaction faster and more easily. Keneally leaves us with a strange literary effect with a double ending which is a bit difficult to grasp.

One of the most remarkable things about this remarkable book is that it was written when Keneally was in his mid 70's.  I am following a number of popular authors much younger than Keneally who have either run out of ideas or their work has run out of steam. He has certainly not run out of steam and I look forward to reading his next book, Shame and the Captives, about WWII POW's held in Australia to be released at the end of October 2013.