A Mysterious Hero. Review on Schindler's List - Thomas Keneally

Thomas Keneally takes on a mystery-Oskar Schindler-set in the midst of the horror of World War II and tries to explain how a rather self-indulgent German businessman made it his business to save thousands of Jews.

Overall, he succeeds in explaining how Schindler, a German industrialist, went about saving the many Jews assigned to work for him.

But what he can't do, though he tries valiantly, is explain why.

Schindler, though hardly a bad guy, hadn't really made much effort to do more than sail through life, having a good time, until confronted with the Nazis' murderous conduct.

That he can't explain it is not a failure of the author. Schindler never could quite explain himself either.

This is an excellent book, well worth the time of anyone interested in a closeup look at yet another piece of life and death under the Nazis.

I read this book several years before the Academy Award-winning film was made and remember wondering how much was fact and how much fiction.

My questions arose simply from the fact that I'd never heard of Schindler until stumbling across the book and, given the facts Keneally laid out about Schindler's life, it was a bit hard to believe that he'd sacrifice anything for anyone.

The book's narrative style doesn't put it firmly in the pure history column; it's not a biography, really. It's just a wrenching account of a man who, given the hideous events of the time, for some reason felt compelled to risk everything to save the poor wretches around him.