Schindler's List

 Schindler's List (Schindler's Ark; 1982) by Thomas Keneally

Synopsis from Goodreads: The fictionalized history of Oskar Schindler, the Czech-born Southern German industrialist who risked his life to save over 1,100 of his Jewish factory workers from the death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thomas Keneally's "documentary novel," based on the recollections of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler's Jews), Schindler himself, and other witnesses, is told in a series of snapshot stories. It recounts the lives of the flamboyant profiteer and womanizer Schindler; Schindler's long-suffering wife, Emilie; the brutal SS (Nazi secret service) commandant Amon Goeth; Schindler's quietly courageous factory manager, Itzhak Stern; and dozens of other Jews who underwent the horrors of the Nazi machinery. At the center of the story, though, are the actions and ambitions of Schindler, who comes to Craków, Poland, seeking his fortune and ends up outwitting the SS to protect his Jewish employees. It is the story of Schindler' unlikely heroism...[and it] explores the completx nature of virtue, the importance of individual human life, the roles of witnesses to the Holocaust, and the attention to rules and details that sustained the Nazi system of terror.

On the basis of importance, there is no doubt about the value of Keneally's book. It tells about the bravery of one man in the midst of great evil. Was Schindler a saint. No. He was a flawed man with faults and weaknesses, but he put himself at great risk in order that he might save as many Jews as he could from the concentration camps and gas chambers. There were so many points at which things might have gone wrong and he could have been shot out of hand or sent to a labor camp himself. 

However, judging the book as a novel. I find it lacking. Keneally chose to tell this important true story through the lens of fictionalized history--as a novel rather than as nonfiction. But the book does not read as a novel. It reads very much as a nonfiction account of Schindler's activities during the war. The only real difference between this and the usual nonfiction is that there are no footnotes giving credit to the sources for the information. As a novel, it lacks stylistic flow. The plot is disjointed and people are introduced in sporadic episodes throughout the narrative. With so many unfamiliar names, it is incredibly difficult to keep everyone straight and it took me out of what narrative continuity there was. The most novel-like section comes at the end when peace is imminent and Schindler makes a final speech to the Jewish laborers at his factory. If the entire book had been written in the same style it would have appealed to me much more as a story. This is a rare case where the movie has done a better job of telling a story than the book did. If I rated the work purely on importance, then five stars--no question. As a piece of literature ★★★ only (and I'm still giving points for the weight of the story instead of the power of the storytelling). 

First line: In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it--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.

Last line: He was mourned on every continent.