Schindler's List:
Kosciesza, Bogumil
A novel informed by prejudice SCHINDLER'S LIST Thomas Keneally Simon and Schuster, $16.95, 398 pp. Begumil Kosciesza SOON after World War II a book was published in Poland. It was a tersely...
...The New York Times obituary says that, on his visit to Germany in 1957, Schindler explained that he did it because he hated cruelty and intolerance...
...In Schindler's List Keneally attempts to explain the man by writing the history of his war years...
...From a hill outside the walls he watches as people are being beaten and shot...
...People like Schindler deserve to be remembered...
...to defeat the system...
...The Poles are portrayed as little, if any, better than the Hitlerite oppressors...
...Books about them should be written...
...The question would not be important - one Nazi lie or another - if Keneally did not use the incident to launch into a multi-page anti-Polish diatribe equal to the best efforts of the creators of anti-Semitic libels...
...When the crimes the book describes were prompted by lies, the book should be scrupulously truthful...
...In spite of the brevity of the book, regardless of the postwar paper shortage, the Polish writer deemed it necessary to add a footnote to a notice of the opening of a forced labor camp - a Nazi factory...
...It was a tersely written diary of the Nazi occupation of Cracow: a date, a fact - so many arrested, a concentration camp opened, a Nazi proclamation issued...
...Writing of the stealing by the Nazis of the famous gothic altar from the Church of Our Lady in Cracow, Keneally declares that it "had until weeks ago diverted worshippers with its crowd of jostling divinities...
...This book is neither...
...Schindler's List makes the man and his motives difficult to understand...
...Materials available at the Library of Congress show that all the orders establishing ghettos gave the same rationale for their creation: to separate the Poles from Jewish influence because the Jews were intractable enemies of German rule...
...Perhaps he became too enamored of his vision of Schindler as an incarnation of Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Schweik, and as a result fitted the person to the writer's mold...
...Strangely, Keneally's Schindler, moving freely about Nazi-occupied Cracow, had managed not to see the brutality that was everywhere...
...The succession of roundups of people leaving churches after Mass, the many "bloody Sundays," the attempts at "returning" Cracow to the status of a''pure German'' city are ignored in Keneally's book...
...That image of the Eastern Jew as a dirty, challet-wearing, money-lending, yarmulked subspecies did nothing to make Hitler's propaganda less plausible...
...A chapter in the book has Schindler, late in the war, observe a brutal roundup in the ghetto...
...The sight makes him vomit, and from that day on, Keneally says, Schindler was "resolved to do everything...
...and to quarantine the Jews for health reasons...
...In preparation for writing the book Keneally is said to have visited Cracow accompanied by one of his main informants...
...Curiously, the few mentions of the resistance movement refer only to actions of the Communist partisans and of the ZOB - a Jewish resistance organization...
...The Cracow ghetto was not the first the Nazis established on Polish territory...
...A book about any part of the Holocaust would, no, should be disturbing...
...In 1962 Schindler was honored by Israel as a Righteous Person...
...Later, Keneally talks about the Jewish auxiliary ("Yellow") police, a force despised and feared in the ghettos...
...The main panel of the altar depicts the dormition of Mary - she is surrounded by the Apostles...
...Oskar Schindler died in Frankfurt October 9, 1974...
...Considering that the Polish underground movement was large and active from 1939, and that the Communists, by their own statements, did not even start organizing partisan groups until the summer of 1942, the imbalance is strange...
...Pious Catholics among Schindler's family emerge as, at best, insipid fools...
...Keneally describes him as an assimilated Jew, a, Polish army officer, a graduate of the Jagiellonian University, Schindler's black-market agent, and an early member of the "yellow" police...
...to gather the Jewish wealth in one place the better to administer it...
...They should be written by writers who are less biased and better equipped to evaluate data.r equipped to evaluate data...
...Keneally has it that the order establishing the Cracow ghetto claimed that its purpose was to protect the Jews from the Polish population...
...The thousands of arrests, the public executions, the beatings, the evictions...
...The words epitomize Western, "emancipated," Jewry's disdain of the Ostjude...
...Sylvester by the Vatican...
...This one is - but for the wrong reason...
...This man, Keneally's hero of several brilliant escapes from Nazi clutches, shares with Schindler,the book's dedicatory passage...
...Orthodoxy, of whatever religion, does not fare well in Keneally's book...
...In view of the book's obvious failings, one wonders if the picture Keneally draws of Schindler is close to reality...
...At his request, he was buried in the Latin Cemetery in Jerusalem...
...Why did this German risk his life to protect a group of Jews...
...Originally it was a high-minded organization, he says, formed really to protect the Jewish population and composed mainly of westernized Jews, "young men of compassion and some education.'' It was only later, under the influence of "a former glazier named Symche Spira," that the force became evil...
...In 1968 he was created a Knight of...
...This was the rationale elucidated by the Governor General of the occupied Polish territories, Hans Frank, even before any ghettos were established...
...Keneally chose "[t]o use the texture and devices of a novel to tell" Schindler's story...
...The owner, the footnote said, "inscribed himself well in the memories of the inmates...
...But is it really likely that the regional chief of Cracow, working under the very nose of Frank, would have been the only one to change the kingpin's formula...
...Spira, Keneally says, ''was of Orthodox background and . . . despised the Europeanized Jewish liberals...
...Apparently this incident, seen from a distance, was Schindler's first experience of violence...
...I was unable to find in the Library of Congress the actual wording of the order...
...Early in the book Keneally describes young Schindler's Jewish friends as not "Ashkenazim - quirky, Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox" (reviewer's emphasis...
...Ringelblum, writing from within the closed Warsaw Ghetto, managed to note such events in the larger city and beyond...
...The picture that emerges is that of a self-indulgent individual, an amoral if not immoral reveler, a blatant adulterer, a grabber at the main chance, a profligate, perhaps at best an esthete...
...A book that speaks of the perhaps worst-ever manifestation of ethnic and religious prejudice should itself be free of such prejudice...
...Except for his wartime venture - built with Jewish capital and run with Jewish management - Keneally's Schindler is even a business failure...
...But then Keneally appears to be ignorant of even the basic tenet of Christianity - its monotheism...
...Poland produced probably the most Hasidei Ummot Ha-olam, the "Just among the Nations," even though it was the only country under Nazi rule where helping a Jew even by giving him a glass of water was punishable, and punished, by death...
...Yet, by innuendo, by half truths and by untruths, Keneally repeatedly slanders the Polish population...
...West Germany gave him its Cross of Merit in 1966, and the International Martin Buber Society its peace prize in 1967...
...The owner was Oskar Schindler, a Sudetendeutsch, a non-practicing Catholic, a party member, and an intelligence officer in Admiral Canaris's Abwehr...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 9
