Filed at 7:58 a.m. ET
LONDON (Reuters) - In "Searching for Schindler" Australian author Thomas
Keneally recalls how he came to write the award-winning novel "Schindler's
Ark," which reached global fame through Steven
Spielberg's Oscar-winning adaptation.
Despite the title, and by the author's own admission, the new book fails to
unravel the enigma of Oskar Schindler, a black-marketeering, womanizing Nazi who
saved over 1,000 Jews from almost certain death in World War Two concentration
camps. But it is a tribute to Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg, the Polish Jew and
Holocaust survivor who encouraged and cajoled Keneally into writing Schindler's
story and helped bully Hollywood into turning it into a movie.
The indefatigable owner of a Los Angeles luggage shop, without whom
"Schindler's Ark" would never have been written, emerges as the real hero, and
the new book is dedicated to Poldek, who died in 2001, and his wife who survived
him.
"I thought this man is such a large character that he deserves a book in his
own right," Keneally told Reuters in a telephone interview from Australia.
"Poldek ... knew nothing about publishing and yet he was more correct than
the publishers; he knew nothing about the film industry but again he was
validated," he added, referring Poldek's unbridled optimism in the potential of
the story.
"It's particularly touching that he did it primarily to honor the memory of a
man who had saved him and his wife ... Poldek was the first one to say to me he
(Schindler) was Jesus Christ, and although he was Jesus Christ, a saint he
wasn't."
Schindler, through persuasion and bribery, convinced Nazi officials that the
Jews who worked at his factory in southern Poland were essential to Adolf
Hitler's war effort.
As Soviet troops advanced in 1944, Schindler's bookkeeper drew up the list of
workers he wanted to take with him to a new factory site further west, sparing
them from death. Poldek, born in Krakow, Poland, was number 173 on the list.
CASHING IN?
Searching for Schindler opens with a chance encounter in 1980 between
Keneally and Poldek at his Beverly Hills store.
He tells Keneally his story, provides documents, convinces him to write the
tale and accompanies him around the world gathering testimony from "Schindler's
Jews," many of whom would not have spoken to Keneally without Poldek's
assurances.
Poldek also badgers Spielberg to make the film, which he did in 1993, 11
years after the novel won the Booker
Prize.
"Schindler's List" went on to win seven Academy Awards and fulfilled what
Poldek predicted all along: "An Oscar for Oskar."
Keneally has faced criticism from some commentators and reviewers who
suggested he had profited twice from the horrors of the Holocaust and failed to
honor properly Schindler's wife Emilie, a wartime heroine in her own right.
"I can see that criticism and I don't resent it," he said.
"I had a story to tell, and if you've got a story to tell and you're a writer
you tend to tell it ... It was not done without compensation to the major
actors, I have to say, but on the other hand it's true it could be perceived
like that."
In the book, Keneally disputes claims that Emilie went unrewarded for the
book and film. He also singled out her act of kindness to a Jewish boy prisoner
when she replaced his broken glasses by visiting the optician who had his
prescription.
"She was treating him as a human with normal human needs at a time when he
was considered a sub-human," Keneally said.
Emilie Schindler died in 2001 aged 93.