Review: Guardian book club: Week three: Thomas Keneally on the genesis of
Schindler’s Ark
THOMAS KENEALLY
The Guardian – United Kingdom
Published: May 19, 2007
It was considered improbable that Schindler’s Ark would win the Booker
Prize of 1982. It was a work of faction, perhaps, in the Capote
mode. It could be described as a documentary novel, but was it a real
novel? I was so certain of the book’s lack of a chance that I drank my
nervous publisher’s cognac at the end of the dinner in the splendid
Guild Hall, certain there was no chance I would be called on to speak.
The controversy which followed my being called to the rostrum was a
wondrous thing, the equivalent of archbishops condemning one’s book
from the pulpit, a fruitful service to the publishing industry which
archbishops have sadly grown less willing to perform. In any case, my
most uncharacteristic book, the one with which my name has become
identified, was thus accepted by the reading public and ultimately by
Steven Spielberg.
In a lecture at Sydney University once, the late great William Burgess
said that his aim was to write books which would be around for 10
years in hardcover and paperback, and thereafter fondly recalled. Ten
years is a tough survival test for many fine books now. So in
acknowledging that Schindler’s Ark is still around after 25 years, I’m
aware that it was a lucky book. It shouldn’t have won anyhow. William
Boyd’s The Ice Cream War should have.
The questions I have been most commonly asked since are: how did you
encounter the tale of Oskar Schindler? And how is it that an
Australian wrote it?
The first answer is that I met a Schindler survivor named Leopold
Pfefferberg in his Beverly Hills luggage store in October 1980. Buying
a briefcase to replace one which came unstuck, I was in there a long
time while Mastercard investigated my bona fides. If Australians had
not then possessed a reputation for credit card fraud I would have
been in and out of that place in 10 minutes. But Leopold had time to
get talking, and ultimately led me out through the repair room, where
Mischa, his wife, was working on orders, to a filing cabinet. It was
full of Schindler material including testimonies of survivors,
photographs of the period, documents, some of them produced by Oskar
himself, copies of SS telegrams, and the famous list of
Swangsarbeitslager Brinnlitz, Oskar’s second camp.
Leopold pointed out his own name and that of Mischa on the list with
their numbers, their supposed tasks in the camp – Metalarbeiter in the
case of Mischa, who had never worked with metal to that time. It was
shocking that a considerable number of northern Europeans had
considered Poldek and Mischa such a virus on European civilisation
that the only thing to do with them was rob them of all breath.
Poldek had given copies of these documents to any journalist or pro
ducer who was interested. In the early 1960s, while Oskar was still
alive, a producer at MGM had tried to have a movie made. The documents
happened to stick with me.
Second question: why an Australian? My long-distance association with
the Nazis began when my mother and I saw my father off to the Middle
East at Central Station in Sydney early in the war, on his way to
Melbourne to take ship with other troops for the Middle East. Via
cloth-sewn packages I received captured emblems of the Afrika Korps,
non-commissioned officers’ insignia, a Luger holster with the Swastika
and eagle on it, a Very pistol ditto. Then, in 1945 in a suburban
cinema in Sydney, I sat by my mother and saw the newsreels from
Bergen-Belsen and felt the shock of the working-class soldiers’ wives
around us.
I was always fascinated by the contrast between Europe as a temple of
culture which we Aussies might luckily one day visit, and its other
reality as a small, vicious, warring place likely to drag colonials
into its hecatombs. My father’s eldest brother survived but had his
life grossly diminished by service on the western front in the first
world war. My father was judged to have incurred a foreshortening of
his life by his service in North Africa. (He tricked them all by
living to be 92.) My wife’s brother, a Bomber Command and Pathfinder
flier, was appalled all his life by his experience of Dresden, in
which his plane repeatedly dropped bombing flares from low level. He
died far too young. Yet there’s a presumption that we’re too far
removed to have any interest in Europe, its glories and its
still-not-yet-fully-reconciled ethnic manias. There’s still something
of a belief that we should confine ourselves in our interests to
cricket and crocodile hunting.
The final question is this, and it’s a universal one: by writing about
the Holocaust, or the Armenian massacres, or the Irish famine, and
trying to get to the truth of them, are you encouraging extremist
actions by Israeli hardliners, say, or the Armenian Brotherhood, or
the IRA? By writing about the Holocaust does one signify a lack of
sympathy for the Palestinians? By writing a history of the
transportation of Irish politicals to Australia, as I did in a book
named The Great Shame , does one whistle up hardcore hatred in Ulster?
Of course not, I would argue. In situations where old injustices have
been addressed, people are reconciled with history enough to confront
it. In situations where justice still does not run, it’s the system,
not the historians, who create conflict.
Join Thomas Keneally and John Mullan for a discussion on Tuesday May
22 at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1. Doors open at
6.30pm. Tickets cost pounds 8 (includes a glass of wine). To book
email [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) or
call 020 7886 9281.
To order a copy of Schindler’s Ark for pounds 7.99 with free UK p&p
call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
