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ADAPTING THE HOLOCAUST
Schindler's List, intellectuals and public knowledge
Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (1983) relates the actions of an ethnic German war-profiteer who preserved more than 1,000 Kraków Jews from extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among the ‘Righteous Gentiles’ whose altruism has been documented and honoured by Yad Vashem, the Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, Oskar Schindler is an unusual figure: his economic and sexual opportunism make his virtue unconventional. This in part explains the form of Keneally's book: ‘the novel's techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar’. But fictionalization threatened to ‘debase the record’, to hamper discrimination ...
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