 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book you got for free.
Schindler's List, by Thomas Keneally. This is technically a novel, but the author sticks as close as he can to the known facts of Schindler's life. Where something is unknowable, the author offers possibilities but not answers. Foremost among the unanswerable questions: why did businessman Oskar Schindler risk everything to save his Jewish workers, when almost all of his colleagues cooperated with the Nazis? Schindler didn't seem attached to any particular political or religious ideology (he was nominally Catholic but not observant). There was no formative childhood incident that would have made for convenient storytelling. He and his wife had Jewish friends, but as Himmler complained, "every" German had that one Jewish friend that they assumed would be an exception to the persecution. Yet Schindler chose to live the Talmudic saying that his manager Itzhak Stern quoted to him: "He who saves a single life saves the world entire." There were a number of stunning moments that were translated faithfully into Spielberg's movie: sadistic camp kommandant Amon Goeth on his balcony, casually using prisoners for target practice. Goeth killing a Jewish engineer because she told him, accurately, that the construction work had been done wrong. One of Schindler's workers giving his gold fillings to make a ring as a parting gift to Schindler. Unlike the movie, the book has space to give Schindler's wife Emilie her due: they had been separated, but when the factory relocated to Czechoslovakia she joined Oskar's efforts, getting contraband food and medical care for the people under his protection. Schindler had little success in business before or after World War II, leading some to speculate that the skilled businessmen were Stern and others working with him. Schindler's talent was working with people: glad-handing, flattering and bribing high-ranking Nazis to get what he needed from them. He was so good at it that after the Allied victory, Goeth tried to call Schindler as a defense witness - apparently he imagined they were friends. The author makes several mentions of Schindler's womanizing, and seems surprised that there were never any public scenes with his wife and assorted mistresses. Schindler certainly wasn't the first powerful man with that sort of arrangement. But it's noteworthy that he wasn't some plaster saint. Oskar Schindler was a man who might have lived an ordinary life - but when he came face to face with evil, he found the courage to fight back, to save those lives and do what he could to save the world entire.
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