Schindler's List

In an engrossing account based on the testimony of those known as Schindlerjuden (Schindler's Jews,) Thomas Keneally reconstructs the story of Oskar Schindler, the enigmatic prison camp Direktor and German war profiteer who became the unlikely savior of over 1,300 Holocaust Jews.

Secretly appalled by the deeds of his countrymen, Oskar Schindler set up a factory in which he sustained his workers on black-market food and protected them from deportation to death camps through his various wheelings and dealings and bribes of Party officials. Quite unexpected of a heavy-drinking, womanizing, Nazi Party industrialist, Schindler's personal risks and sacrifices showed unforgettable courage and grace to people whom evil had surrounded and systematically worked to destroy.

Keneally based his narrative account on the interviews of 50 Schindler survivors and on countless testimonies and documents supplied by Yad Vashem, The Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, by various wartime associates of Schindler's, and by many of Schindler's postwar friends. In the company of Leopold Pfefferberg, one of Schindler's survivors, Keneally visited Cracow, Plaszów, Lipowa Street, Zablocie, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, places associated with Schindler's operations and therefore prominent in the book.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction

From the author of the new novel The Daughters of Mars, Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.

Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.

Winner of the Booker Prize

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction

Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.

Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.

Reissued to coincide with the release of Steven Spielberg's film of the same name from Universal Pictures, this Booker Prize-winning novel tells the true story of one remarkable man who outwitted the Nazis to save more Jews during WWII than any single person. "A masterful account of the growth of the human soul". --LA Times Book Review.

Thomas Keneally was born in 1936 and raised in the rugged expanse of Australia. As a

young man, he planned to join the priesthood, but by 1960, on the verge of the Vietnam

War, Keneally found the church in such moral turmoil that he decided it was impossible

to go through with his ordination.

Keneally received his formal education in Sydney, Australia. Over the past 30 years, he

has published over 25 novels, more than a dozen screenplays, and several works of

non-fiction. These works include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The Playmaker,

Season in Purgatory, A Family Madness, and Woman of the Inner Sea. His work

has been nominated four times for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 for Schindler's

List. He won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, The Miles Franklin Award, The

Critics Circle Award, and a Logie (Australian Emmy).

A self-described "literary biker," Keneally has traveled through Australia, Iceland, Antarctica,

America, Eastern Europe, roaming across genres and topics, often championing the underdog.

"I'm a writer who's always been hard to pin down," Keneally says, "because I've sometimes

written about things that are none of my concern — like the American South or Antarctica or

Australian aboriginals or the Holocaust. I think I appeal to 'hells angels' kind of writers."

Keneally has modeled many of his characters after the traditional Australian hero — the

"battler." "In America everyone admires successful men and women. In Australia, they

suspect them. The Australian hero is the person to whom everything has happened —

drought, fire, flood."

Oskar Schindler is a classic Keneally character — conflicted and flawed, the antithesis of a

one-dimensional altruistic saint. And Schindler's story is a classic Keneally story — an

ordinary man placed in a situation of enormous moral dilemma.

While researching Schindler's List, the author spent two years traveling to eight countries, where he interviewed many of Schindler's Jews and read the numerous testimonies which

are held at the Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, Yad Vasbem, Israel.

Keneally lives in California where he teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of

California, Irvine, where he holds a Distinguished Professorship.

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