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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

SCHINDLER'S LIST By Thomas Keneally. Illustrated. 398 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $16.95.

WHEN the German Army invaded Poland in 1939, a swarm of carpetbaggers trailed after it, eager for the spoils of empire. They were the black marketeers and middlemen, the young sharks who knew how to get a general drunk and leave with a contract in their pockets. Among them was a young Sudeten German named Oskar Schindler, who had a reputation for womanizing and giving lavish parties for his influential friends. Schindler knew how to make a bureaucrat happy, and he was rewarded with one of Cracow's plums. He was appointed Aryan treuhandler -read plunderer - of a prosperous Jewish-owned enamelware factory.

It was good to be an enterprising young German in Cracow in 1939. There was a problem, though, which Schindler experienced firsthand in the anguished faces of the Jewish workers at his newly acquired factory. A stream of directives had made Jewish life increasingly precarious in Cracow. Walls went up around a suburb, and the city's Jews were packed into it, half a dozen to a room. Schindler shrugged uncomfortably and hoped that these excesses would soon stop. They were the exuberance of empire, the unruly high spirits of various unpleasant elements in the occupying forces, in particular the SS, those puritans who swallowed ideology the way Schindler swallowed cognac. Meanwhile he dropped hints to some of his Jewish workers about upcoming Aktions by the SS, which he had gleaned during his drinking parties with the colonels, captains and supervisors.

History would not normally be concerned with such a man as Oskar Schindler, a mere minor player in the sybaritic night life of a small Polish city during an unspeakable war. But history is not an exact science, and Oskar Schindler is remembered, as few men have ever been, in the testimony of 1,300 Jewish workers who escaped Poland's cities of death because Schindler, against every probability, became a possessed man, ready to risk everything in a daring, almost flaunted mission of rescue.

THE versatile Australian novelist, Thomas Keneally, tells the true story of Schindler's rescue effort in this remarkable book which has the immediacy and the almost unbearable detail of a thousand eyewitnesses who forgot nothing. The story is not only Schindler's. It is the story of Cracow's dying ghetto and the forced labor camp outside of town, at Plaszow. It is the story of Amon Goeth, Plaszow's commandant and Schindler's dark twin. Like Schindler, Goeth loved women and fine cognac; like Schindler, he was sleek, overweight. If Schindler raked in the profits from his Emalia factory, Goeth raked them in from the plundered suitcases of Jews, the gold teeth, the extorted diamonds. If Schindler saved Jews, Goeth killed them: singly, as when he picked off workers with a rifle from his front porch, or in bunches, as when he ordered lines of inmates up a hill to be killed by his Ukrainian guards and buried in the woods. Goeth was distressed that his black market friend, Oskar Schindler, had been infected by the Jewish ''virus,'' as Goeth put it, but he helped Schindler almost whimsically in his embarrassing crusade: When millions were dying, what did it matter that a thousand lived a year or so longer? Such was Cracow during the war: a hallucination, a madness, and it drove Oskar Schindler to his own saving madness.

According to Mr. Keneally, who absorbed archives of eyewitness material in a remarkably short time, it began in earnest one summer day in 1942, when Schindler and his latest mistress were riding on horseback in the hills surrounding Cracow. Below them stretched a suburb with a wall around it, the new ghetto. Shouts drifted up the grassy slope, an SS Aktion was in course. Schindler saw Jews being driven out of houses, lined up and sorted with the crazed orderliness that was the signature of the killing machine. On one street, a man resisted, and an SS soldier shot him in the head. Schindler noticed a little girl in a red coat turn around to watch. The SS soldier patted her on the head and coaxed her back into the line. Schindler got off his horse and threw up. He understood now that the SS did not care who witnessed these acts, because the witnesses, even the little girl in the red coat, would die too. Death would erase the Jews, and also the killing.

Schindler must have known that he possessed a genius of sorts. He bribed and cajoled like a master trickster, and then he had his greatest stroke. He would not merely save a life here and there, procure Aryan papers for a clandestine Jew, slip bread or money to an occasional inmate at Plaszow. He would save a thousand lives and, like a ferociously mocking god, he would do it for all to see.

Schindler obtained authorization to create a work camp in an empty lot next to his factory and house his Jewish workers there. He fed them out of his own pocket, stole medical supplies for them and managed to keep SS guards from entering the camp on any pretext. When an SS inspector showed up, he poured cognac down his throat before letting him onto the work floor, so that he would not notice the unseemly healthiness of Schindler's workers. For three years Schindler manipulated officials who could, with a shrug, have consigned him to the death camps. He was arrested several times and released with the bemused blessing of highly placed officials. He slipped between seams of the killing machine, and he saved lives.

IN 1944, the slaughter of Jews reached its final paroxysm. Auschwitz, only hours away, was a metropolis of death with, on a given day, half a million inhabitants. Schindler's island of sanity shook, the cattle cars were never far: A flick of the pen, the transfer of names from one list to another in the infernal bookkeeping, and the machine would devour a thousand more lives without noticing. But Schindler applied his genius one more time. He traveled to Berlin, sent cases of liquor to well-placed generals at SS headquarters in Oranienburg. While Germany starved, he came up with hampers full of sausages and cigarettes. And he obtained permission to relocate his precious Emalia factory to the hills of Czechoslovakia along with his entire contingent of ''skilled workers.''

Here Mr. Keneally's narrative becomes heightened, almost operatic. A list of Schindlerjuden was drawn up by the Plaszow camp authorities: Those on it would live a little longer (and eventually be saved), those not on it would die now. Schindler's ''skilled workers'' included rabbis, children, women, a girl dying of cancer, friends, anyone whose name he could remember. The list was a raft on a sea of six million dead. Among the convoys of Jews that rattled across Poland in cattle cars that fall of 1944, only the Schindlerjudenwere not funneled into the killing camps; only they, 1,300 on a tiny raft, reached the haven of those Czechoslovakian hills.

In his 1980 novel, ''Confederates,'' Mr. Keneally recreated the American South during the Civil War in all its concreteness and lilt of language, surely a stunning feat for an Australian Irishman. Now he has accomplished a similar feat even more tellingly. ''Schindler's List'' reads like a novel: Its voices are thick with living tissue; its scenes are so vivid they appear to result from a kind of ventriloquism. Perhaps after 37 years, it has become possible to write of such things without the cry of anguish, the testimony of rage. Perhaps by choosing to write about Amon Goeth's reign of deadly caprice - a measurable horror beside the obliterating fact of Auschwitz - Mr. Keneally has chosen a subject that art can contain. Today the Schindlerjuden are scattered from Israel to Los Angeles, and Mr. Keneally has gathered their testimony. He has read the archives they deposited at Yad Vashem, The Martyr's and Hero's Remembrance Authority, in Jerusalem. Because of their memories, he has grasped not simply the ''holocaust'' -that end-of-world fire - but the fragile daily acts of survival and death which human beings manage, even in the mouth of hell. He has given Oskar Schindler the stunning reality of a man who was neither ''good'' nor ''virtuous'' but a genius of life, a savior.

IN the old epics a character is occasionally inhabited by a god, and then he acts beyond himself, living on the edge of wonder. When the god leaves him he becomes ordinary once again. Years afterward Schindler's wife, Emilie, ''remarked that Oskar had done nothing astonishing before the war, and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945, he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.''

For three years during the war Oskar Schindler was inhabited by a profound moral passion, and then the god left him. When the war ended he drifted from one failed business to another. Eventually he arranged to live part of the year in Israel, supported by his Jewish friends, and part of the year as a sort of internal emigre in Frankfurt, where he was often hissed in the streets as a traitor to his race. After 29 unexceptional years he died in 1974.

There is a mystery here, and Mr. Keneally is too good a writer to try to explain it. He leaves us with the remarkable story of a man who saved lives when every sinew of civilization was devoted to destroying them.

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

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Saved by Oskar Schindler: Testimony of Holocaust survivor Sol Urbach

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First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me