REVIEW: SCHINDLER’S LIST BY THOMAS KENEALLY

I write to escape white pages. And, I read to delve into them. I’ve fallen into one that I cannot evade.

The last time I was talking about the book, my friend says, “That is Schindler’s Ark and not List; did you even read that?” To which I say, “No, I did not.” For I did not read the book, but saw it happening; for I know there were words before me, but pellucid pictures that I could descry; for there were no movies, but there was a movie. Also, there was a movie, and there were none. All I could speak to her was, “No, I did not read the novel but watched the movie rather,” and that like the Americans did!

When it comes to historical works, my personal histories have always lacked the altruism to connect to them. Which is why I admit, Schindler’s List had never been my first choice. It had always been in the background while I decided my reads. Literally. And, unceasingly! It was somewhat a bleak day when I decided to give it a go, with a light in my mind, “Holy Father, help me!” And, I don’t repent now, He did help it seems. For I now see that histories happen; they do not get picked, they pick you. Several others have picked me since.

But this, comrades, is about Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally, and about Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten German, agnostic, politic and flirtatious, who rescued and manumitted over a thousand Jewish people in the German Holocaust.

This man, Schindler, was a man who, under ordinary circumstances, would just fit the antagonist’s role! A womaniser, a drinker! The absence of war, he said, is why all his former enterprises failed. This war, he said, would fructify his venture like no other. Indeed, it almost seems ironic now, how his eventual, commercial failure had not been the only victory then. What ensued was Schindler salvaging the Jews by pretending to make them work in his armaments factory. He ensured, by misconfiguring the machines and suborning his cartel, that his factory does not yield anything to the cause of the war, that it produces no such cartridge that can melt a life and feed the pyre of war. For a business-magnate, his business was all but going up in smoke. On the eventful day when Germany finally surrendered, Oskar had to flee, for he was a fragment of the party that waged a gory ‘incineration’ against the Jewish people and would be hunted then for saving, no, killing them. Keneally remarks, “There was something nuptial about it, for Oskar, who had come to Brinnlitz with so many women, was leaving with his wife.”

The cover of the book (Simon and Schuster), with a roster of names, set in a flimsy typewriter font, hits you deep down somewhere. Lower, you can imagine, after you have read the novel and still rooted when you have read it two times! “This list is life.” The sentence is life on its own. How much would the list, that had the fates of Jews saved, have weighed. What would it have taken to make one such list? Under the calamitous engines that devoured the Jewish people, under the idiosyncrasy killing them, lied not just a cited need but a ritual, a game, a national priority! He saved his Jewish protégés not because they were Jews or even humans. The reader does not know why Schindler protected them. I reckon, even Schindler would not have known, let alone Keneally. The book makes no attempts to expatiate. What does the book do then? With a discharge of commas, alphabets, and German names floating in a reservoir of inarticulate feelings, with the dampness of stone structures that confide in them a hurling secret, the secret of life, the book lives on.

How did the secret pulverise itself unto me? With the smell of buckshot piercing through the pages. Through the dominos that fell and the others that did not, scaffolded not unto fate but the list. The list that never hit the tables, that was never given up on, that had an old smell of days of sweat emanating from it, with edges abraded with inflictions of past and intentions of future.

As you read through, dissolving into the scent of each fresh-unread page, which is only second to petrichor, the tumultuous observation that you have no difficulties in pronouncing German words that you had been reading with squinty eyes almost prises upon you by the time you are halfway through the novel. For you are no more yourself, you are a Schindler, an Emilie, a Wicktoria, some Pfefferberg! I do not know if I have kosher enough a judgement to make out the reasons for the same. Keneally almost naturalises a Jew-life during the Holocaust, with no oblique descriptions of excruciating lives but simple stories from the camps. Like that of Mrs Chaja Dresner, a Schindlerjuden, who finally survives; or that of a German youth, her son’s friend, who saves her by ‘staking his existence.’ Or a Jewish woman, her friend, who denies rendering her any shelter. Incubating, dabbling and absorbing the squelching under slack water is what you feel in bones while reading the piece full of truth, time and life, almost devoid of the descriptive ends, and the sounds and screams of the carnage a writer could have possibly storied. Whereas, any other work on the theme, like The Last Jew of Treblinka, seems belly-flopping with too much truth for eyes to harbour.

Saramago says, “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.” That something which has no name tethers together the facts, undiluted yet mild, and fudges together histories every time you read the novel. You read life. You read through life and histories happen!

A white page appears.