Schindler's List: The True Story of the Man Who Saved Twelve Hundred Jews

He was a war profiteer. He was a member of the Nazi Party. He was a spy for German military intelligence and a man who spent his working life cheating, bribing, and charming his way through deals. He was also the man who saved the lives of approximately 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust — more than any other individual German — spending his entire personal fortune to do it, bribing SS officers, falsifying production records, and ending the war bankrupt in a factory that nominally made artillery shells and actually made nothing. Oskar Schindler is one of the most extraordinary characters of the twentieth century precisely because he defies easy categorization. He was not virtuous in any conventional sense. He was not religious. He had no ideology of resistance. He was, until the moment he was not, a man entirely in the business of getting rich from the misery of others. What changed him — and when, and why — is a question that historians have debated ever since Thomas Keneally's 1982 novel and Steven Spielberg's 1993 film made him famous. This book tells the true story: the Kraków factory and the enamelware pots, the terrifying Amon Göth, the list itself — typed and retyped, argued over name by name — and the seven months in a factory in the Sudetenland where 1,200 people lived when almost no one else did. It is a story about what individual human beings can do when they decide to try.